Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello! This is my first post after lurking on here in search for answers for a couple of months now. I have no coding / tech background (though taught myself a fair bit over the last year or so, especially editing JSON files), so please forgive me if my question seems obvious or ridiculous to most of you, or simply doesn't make sense. Happy to explain / add detail as required, but want to spare you a background marathon, so will try and keep keep it brief for now.

For a number of reasons, I'm looking to create an app on one device in one environment (let's call it "test environment"), based on a SharePoint List ("test list"). I’m then going to replicate the List in another environment ("live environment / live list"), and transfer the exported package of my app from the test environment into the live environment, except previously having changed the data source details in the package to those of the live list.

I’ve not done anything like this before, so this is my plan of action:

Create two apps based on two near-identical* (but very simple) lists in the test environment and compare the differences is VS Code to understand where in the package reference is made to the data source (appreciate a few won’t show as they reference only the SharePoint Site and not the list itself, so I’m searching for those too).
Re-pack my msapps package, and create a new app based on it, to see if I’ve made all necessary changes. Test the app to see if it runs smoothly.
Once (or if) all works well, create the live list (identical* to the test list) in the live environment, go back to the un-packed msapp files, make those changes again, but this time with the details of the live list, pack everything, send the .zip file to the live environment, create a new app with it and hopefully not emotionally break down if it turns out that it doesn’t work out.

*The test lists will have minor differences so I can clearly separate them, when comparing the files and spotting changes, but the live list will actually be much closer to the test list. It’s just to help me understand the structure of the source code files. E.g. the column "Full name" will be called "fullname1" and "fullname2" in step 1 so I can search for them and learn where the source code files make reference to the different columns.

Now, two main questions - if this venture is as ridiculous as I think it is, has anyone else been crazy (or desperate) enough to try it? Does it work?

And secondly, as I’m going through step one, I notice that the controls in the checksum.json all have what appears to be unique (IDs/names/references?), something random like "C8_Khf9UHo76PpI986aa0Yf/h82llPQs" (this is a random combo I made up, but it’s pretty much what they look like). Appreciate that within in an app, all controls need to have unique names, but I worry that this may be similar to GUIDs and that I won’t be able to accomplish what I’m planning after all, because creating another app with the exact same control names isn’t possible, just like I need to be able to replace the GUID of my list.

I hope this makes any sense at all, just trying to teach myself to do this in the job, with minimal support available to me. Also, if anyone can point me in the direction of general guidance that dissects Power Apps source code, that would be much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance!

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