Scaling large Power Apps deployment

[AndyH_JSY]

Hello!

Within our customer service teams, we have over 75+ PowerApps. The design is almost identical between each of them. There is a form connected to a SharePoint list on Screen1, then a gallery connected to SharePoint, and a bit of code in a button to collect all the info and trigger a flow. 

Now this works really well, but we have found the scaling challenging, as every amendment requires you to go into every app.

Does anyone have any similar experience scaling projects? In an ideal world we would only have 1 app, and it would dynamically change data source / chose relevant code etc.

Any suggestions on how to deploy this are greatly appreciated.

NOTE - Component Libraries can be part of the solution, but are not the entire solution. 

[mdevaney]

@AndyH_JSY

It is possible to show several different datasources in a single gallery but the catch all datasources must have the same column names.  Therefore, you must use SHOWCOLUMNS to get only the data you need and RENAMECOLUMNS to put the data into standard column names.

Here's some sample code for the Items property of a gallery.

Switch(
    varDatasourceSelected,
    "A",
    RenameColumns(
        ShowColumns(
            TableA,
            "Asset Name"
            "Asset Category"
        ),
        "Asset Name", "Title",
        "Asset Category", "Subtitle"
    ),
    "B",
    RenameColumns(
        ShowColumns(
            TableB,
            "Vehicle Name"
            "Vehicle Location"
        ),
        "Vehicle Name", "Title",
        "Vehicle Location", "Subtitle"
    )
)

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Blog: https://matthewdevaney.com 
 

[FabianAckeret]

Hi @AndyH_JSY 

Unfortunately, it is not possible to have a dynamic SharePoint data source in Power Apps. The approach you described is what everyone needs to go through. 

If you would consider using Dataverse for Teams, however, the whole thing would look different. Dataverse for Teams uses (as the name suggests) dataverse as a data source. If you deploy that app to another team, a new data source for that team will simply be created on-the-go. Kinda solving your issue, eventually.

If you would like to semi-automate the deployment process, you could export your Power Apps (.zip). Then, modify the json file it includes to match the destination URLs and GUIDs, pack it back together to a zip file and upload it again.

This sounds quite cumbersome, but there is actually a script created by @DenisMolodtsov doing all that.

I've created a blog post about it (it says it migrates SharePoint Forms, but it also works with regular Power Apps).

--> https://fabianackeret.com/copy-power-apps-sharepoint-form/

I hope this helps and answers your question.

[mdevaney]

@FabianAckeret 
If my memory serves, its true that you cannot have a dynamic datasource for a gallery in Power Apps but you use table-shaping features and a conditional statement to show different datasources within the same gallery.

---
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[FabianAckeret · Accepted solution]

@mdevaney 

Maybe I got it wrong, but as I understood OP he has 75+ apps that are kinda-identical, but the only difference is the data source. The challenge is to dynamically access a different data source for each app.

I'm not sure about the performance if you have 75+ data sources connected to the app and a switch statement accessing a different table based on a condition. Might be good... might be bad. Something to try out, I'd say 🙂

Cheers