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SQL Power App - How to Use New and Renamed Columns

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Posted on by AedenMaddok

I have a very simple canvas app that is connected to a locally hosted SQL database. It's a very simple app that can execute create, read, edit, and delete (CRUD) operations records in a table. I built the app and had it working smoothly.

After the app's creation, we needed to expand the capabilities of our solution slightly. To expand our solution we added a few columns into our SQL table and renamed an existing column. Now, despite my efforts to refresh the data source of the app, I cannot get the values in these new and renamed columns to appear in the app. I have added the fields to the edit form for example, but the values in those columns will not show up in the app. I also cannot get the values to show up in the gallery on my Browse screen. For example: each of the records shown in the gallery should have either a fax number displayed or an email address displayed but neither value will display.

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Drrickryp Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@AedenMaddok

Try deleting the table from the app (don't panic when everything lights up with errors) and then reconnect it again. All the errors will go away.

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PaulD1 2,914 on at

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If you see the field name, but not the values, I would suspect the experimental setting 'Explicit Column Selection' as being the issue.
This experimental setting is supposed to guess which of columns of data to return and which to ignore in an attempt to improve performance - if you see the column name but no values this is often an indication that this setting is turned on and has made a poor guess about which columns to ignore.
For a SQL DB I would always turn this setting off - you can control which fields to return via a View if necessary and SQL DBs are generally well normalised so you don't return much extraneous data even when referencing the full Table, unlike D365/Dataverse where tables frequently have hundreds of columns due to the de-normalised structures required to circumvent Dataverses limitations on relational querying (inability to join multiple 'levels' in a relational hierarchy).

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timl 36,411 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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In addition to the above suggestions, it can sometimes take some time for changes that you make to a locally hosted SQL database to appear correctly in Power Apps. Stopping and restarting the on-premise gateway service can sometimes correct these irregularities.

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AedenMaddok 32 on at

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This solution did help fix the data being displayed on my gallery; however, it did not solve the problem on my edit form. They are now able to see the existing record values on the form but any changes that are made are not being saved to the database. Below is a picture of the edit screen on my app. If I update each one of these fields, only the SSN field will update correctly in the database; this is the only column on the screen that was not changed in the database. The Fax field is a renamed column, it used to be named "SendVerificationTo" and is now named "SendToFax". The Email field is a new column in our table.

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AedenMaddok 32 on at

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I did turn off this feature, as I agree this seems like a bad idea when using a SQL DB. I had tried Drrickryp's solution first which seems to have fixed the ability to read values from the table. Unfortunately, neither his solution or yours has allowed users to be able to enter values into the database for the fax or email fields. I'm still trying to figure that out.

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AedenMaddok 32 on at

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Any idea what the gateway service might be named? I'm not seeing a service that stands out.

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AedenMaddok 32 on at

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I ended up building a completely new app from scratch. Building an app from scratch quickly appears to be a strength of the Power Apps platform, but modifying the data source appears to be a great weak spot that the developers should really examine if they wish to grow the user base of this platform.

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