r/PowerApps

I’m trying to build an order app, but I’ve run into an issue that I can’t figure out. The error message says:

• Unexpected characters. The formula contains "Error" where "CurlyClose" is expected.
• Unexpected characters. The formula contains "Error" where "ParenClose" is expected.
• Unexpected characters. Characters are being used in the formula in an unexpected way.

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me understand what’s going wrong.

https://preview.redd.it/y54b4yys5h2h1.png?width=786&format=png&auto=webp&s=c2ecb97bc4f254e9d8627258451438b5d2dd2ede

Do you know any Power Platform developers in North Carolina? Wanted to connect and know your thinking for the future power platform aspects.

I’m new to developing with power apps. My background is in C#/.NET SDK development but now I’m on a team reworking my company’s ERP with power apps. I’ve been learning about the features from ms learn courses, and it feels so wrong and slow building stuff with this web editor UI. It feels like I’m developing slower and I don’t have access to any real advanced settings.
My coworker mentioned using VSCode and powerapps cli but that somehow seems even worse (though, if the workflow was explained, I might understand why/how they were doing it that way)
I guess my question is: what does your workflow look like? Do you really do everything in this slow janky editor UI? Are there any external tools you use? What resources can you point me to in order to see/understand how power platform experts actually efficiently create applications?

We currently have a customer Power Pages portal where external users log in and are stored as Contacts in Dynamics/Dataverse. We use their email for Power BI Row Level Security (RLS) and filter dashboards accordingly.

Now we’re trying to build a similar internal employee portal, but we do NOT want employees created as Contacts since they already exist as Dynamics/System Users and authenticate through Microsoft Entra ID.

Goal:

• Employees log into Power Pages using Microsoft credentials
• No Contact creation/duplication
• Use Power BI RLS with USERPRINCIPALNAME()
• Filter dashboards based on Dynamics user lookup fields (ex: Account Manager field on Account table)

Has anyone implemented this architecture successfully? Especially interested in:

• Power Pages + Entra ID workforce authentication
• Avoiding Contact creation
• Mapping authenticated users to Dynamics System Users
• Best practices for internal employee portals

Would appreciate any guidance, docs, or tutorials. Thanks!

I have a customized Sharepoint form. It contains 3 screens. I didn't set StartScreen. If my last viewed form is on screen 2, all other items open on screen 2. It looks Sharepoint customized form preserves the app’s current screen state between openings. If I refresh the list, the form will open on screen 1.

I want all items open on screen 1. There is a timer navigating to different screens based on the form stage. If I set the StartScreen to screen 1, the timer won't work

Hi all,

Built an open source PDF processing tool for Power Automate - watermarking, password protection, and password removal. Runs on your own Azure Function, so you are in control of your documents.

Also included a sample Power App with ready-made flows and instruction on how to make custom connector.

Basically, you can deploy it in under 30 minutes, unless you have restrictions on Azure.

One of the versions is with Docusign integration, you will need a SharePoint list and library for that.

Read/download on GitHub: https://github.com/Benedict-Corp/benedict-pdf

If your organization shares sensitive docs on email, this tool will add protection to your documents.

Feel free to modify it as much as you want, hope it will be useful for you!

Hello everyone,

After recent updates from Microsoft, service accounts now also need MFA (can't do MFA exemptions of for these accounts). As such security team in my place is pushing for service principals. My org is not heavy on Dataverse at present.

I understand that service accounts pose a much greater security liability as compared to service principals. But, service principals need workaround on several connectors used like SharePoint, Outlook etc. As a developer its easy to circumvent around this and use HTTP requests, but the citizen developers(within my org), not sure if they are technically sound to understand this work around.

Also the the need for additional bot licenses or pay as you go for automate flows running under service principal, like $150 per flow is too expensive... Even the $0.6 per flow run is expensive compared to just assigning premium license to a service account.

So how would you handle this or has similar thing happened in your organization? What are my probable alternatives? I did research on this topics before but at that point of time, MFA was still option and could be disabled for service accounts at tenant level, but its not an option anymore. Any thoughts on work around or insights is appreciated.

Thanks!

Is is possible to connect two different flows?

For example, i have two flows and i want the second one to start when the first one finishes. Is it possible? If so, how?

Thanks

How does everyone organize their power platform solutions? I’m setting up a developers guide with naming conventions but can’t decide which would be best for simplicity but organized.

What is everyone doing to achieve delegable searching/filtering on large datasets? Specifically with an in operator?

Hey,

So im kinda new to Power Apps and ive got a question regarding the app im building rn.

So ive decided to create a new solution for a contract management app for my institute. The app is model driven and uses Dataverse on the default enviorment.

The current mode driven app works great for few ppl that enter the data. Ive created js improvents regarding the data input forms for better ux and everything seems to wprk properly.

So now i need to handle the viewing of the data by separate teams. Each team should not be able to see/filter other teams data. So each contract has a team assigned to it (basically the team that owns the contract) but now im kinda dumb how should I approach it. So i thought about creating a proper security groups structure for each of the teams and display only the data assigned to that team. Is that the right approach? Should I create a canvas app for easier management for those rules?

Any help regarding this would be really useful.

Thanks

Pretty new to Power Apps but have been enjoying building my first small business app, however I could do with some help if anyone is able to assist.

The app connects to a single in premise SQL server database, reading from a couple of stored procedures and writing to one table (connection via SQL Server Authentication and installed Power Apps Gateway). There are no flows involved.

My tested App is in a dev environment (non default env) within a solution and has been tested on a tablet (android) already and functionality-wise is ready to be used in the business. I need to finalise the deployment side of things but have been struggling to find clear guides on what I need to do.

I've created a production environment, and the app will connect with different databases in dev and production instances. I have 5 per plan licenses already allocated to the prod environment.

I've been struggling with the process for a few days re exporting from dev and importing into prod environment as managed solution and getting the connection references etc working. I've done a lot of googling and used chat GPT but haven't got to a working process yet.

I've got to the point time-wise where I decided, as an interim measure to buy me time to work out the proper ALM process, to import the app into the prod and push live as an unmanaged solution. Once in the prod env then manually removed all the dev database connections from the app and replaced with connections to the prod database.

All works now under my login (premium Power Apps license) in prod environment on desktop, but for the user acct I've shared the app with (tablet based) it's asking to Allow the SQL Server connection each time opening it, and when open it's showing 'CONNECTION DETAILS failed: connection not configured for this service.' when trying to read from a SQL stored procedure, so simply not connecting.

I figure this is the most critical thing for me to resolve currently - I've tried below, but most posts for this error seem to relate to flows which I'm not using:

• In power platform admin center, granted app users security roles of 'App Opener' & 'Basic User' (diagnostic shows as "User Status: Enabled").
• Clearing storage and cache of Power Apps app on tablet, re-signing in - numerous times.

I'm almost definitely missing something here so any pointers on what to check/change would be massively appreciated.

I’m trying to build a simple attendance tracking app in Power Apps, but I’m still pretty new to this and could use some guidance.

Scenario:

We have a campus with 10 Cottages

Each cottage has 5 youth assigned

Staff need a very simple way to take attendance daily at our recreation center.

The User Experience

• Staff opens the app
• Staff selects a Cottage from a dropdown. Hits Enter
• Second Screen opens and displays only the youth assigned to that cottage (in a list)
• Staff marks attendance:
• Present = Yes/No (checkbox or toggle)
• Staff clicks Submit
• Attendance is recorded

What I have so far:

SharePoint Lists:

• Cottages
• Youths (linked to cottages)
• Attendance (records submissions)

Power App:

• Dropdown (Cottage)
• Gallery (filtered youth list)
• Checkbox for attendance
• Submit button (Patch to SharePoint)

Code for submit button has been failing ALL DAAAY!!! Any guidance is much appreciated.

Also, no one asked me to create this. just taking an initiative. LOL!

I'm currently building a suite of tools for a client that are also looking at a SaaS product in the long run, the long run being 2-5 years. Its complicated data involving audits and compliance which obviously apps already exists for but it will take them time to procure and adopt.

But what will this mean for the future of PowerApps?

Its no secret they are horrible to work with, create, use, but its also the main format of app within a Microsoft house currently.

What will copilot AI bring? So far, its not terribly useful for my workflow, even though I use Claude to help me with the coding of course.

Its making me very unmotivated to keep learning this skill as who knows how many people will be using it in the future.

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a frustrating issue with a custom connector I built for the Dataverse API, specifically around patching/saving Lookup fields.

Here is the situation:

The Setup: I have a Canvas App where users submit data via this custom connector.

What works: All standard fields (Text, Choice, Numbers, etc.) save perfectly fine from the Canvas App. Furthermore, when I test the custom connector directly from the Connector Test Page using the raw JSON payload, the Lookup field updates successfully!

The Problem: When I trigger the exact same connection/action inside the Canvas App, the Lookup field completely fails to populate or save, while the rest of the fields go through.

Inside Dataverse, lookups usually expect the OData bind syntax, something like:

"column_name@odata.bind": "/entity_plural_name(GUID)"

Since it works perfectly in the test harness but fails in the app, I suspect the Canvas App is either stripping out the @odata.bind notation from the record object or formatting the GUID string in a way that Dataverse rejects on the fly.

Has anyone faced this specific discrepancy between the test page and Canvas App execution? How did you format your payload or collection inside Power Fx to force the Canvas App to pass the lookup correctly to the custom connector?

Any insights or workarounds would be massively appreciated!

Hi guys, I just want to extract the user name, e-mail, business unit, and security roles. Can I know which xrm toolbox plugin can give me all the details? And please share any YouTube video explaining the process. It will be helpful for me. Thank you

See this come up constantly and the confusion always starts with how the question is framed.

Dataverse and SharePoint Lists are not two versions of the same thing. They solve different problems.

Dataverse is a purpose-built database for Power Platform. Proper table relationships, row-level security, business rules enforced at the data layer, calculated columns, and performance that handles millions of records without flinching.

SharePoint Lists is a lightweight data storage tool inside M365. Great for simple tracking, team collaboration, and small datasets. It was built to support SharePoint sites — not to power business applications.

So, the real question was never which one to pick. The real question is:

What exactly am I building?

Answer that honestly and the right choice becomes obvious:

• Small internal tool, limited users, simple data, tight budget → SharePoint Lists works fine
• Growing user base, multiple roles, table relationships, data integrity matters → Dataverse, no debate

The 5,000-row threshold in SharePoint Lists alone has broken more apps than bad code ever has. And migrating from SharePoint Lists to Dataverse mid-project is painful in a way that's hard to describe until you've done it.

The licensing cost of Dataverse is real. But so is the cost of rebuilding everything six months later.

Know what you're building first. The data source decision makes itself after that.

Happy to answer if anyone is planning a build and weighing both options. And if you're working on a Power Platform project and need a hand — whether it's architecture decisions like this or full development. DM me.