PowerApps datasource to overcome 500 visible or searchable items limit

Question

For PowerApps, what data source, other than SharePoint lists are accessible via Powershell?

There are actually two issues that I am dealing with. The first is dynamic updating and the second is the 500 item limit that SharePoint lists are subject to.

I need to dynamically update my data source, which I am currently doing with PowerShell. My data source is not static and updating records by hand is time-consuming and error prone. The driving force behind my question is that the SharePoint list view threshold is 5,000 records however you are limited to 500 visible and searchable records when using SharePoint lists in the Gallery View and my data source contains greater than 500 but less than 1000 records. If you have any items beyond the 500th record that should match the filter criteria, they will not be found. So SharePoint lists are not optional for me until that limitation is remediated

Reference: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/tutorials/function-filter-lookup/

Answer 1

To your first question, Powershell can be used for almost anything on the Microsoft stack. You could use SQL server, Dynamics 365, SP, Azure, and in the future there will be an SDK for the Common Data Service. There are a lot of connectors, and Powershell can work with a good majority of them.

Take note that working with these data structures through Powershell is independent from Powerapps. Powerapps just takes the data that the data connector gives it, and if you have something updating the data in the background (Powershell, cron job, etc.), In order to get a dynamic list of items, you can use a Timer control and a Refresh function on your data source to update the list every ~5-20 seconds.

To your second question about SharePoint, there is an article that came out around the time you asked this regarding working with large lists. I wouldn't say it completely solves your question, but this article seems to state using the "Filter" function on basic column types would possibly work for you:

...if you’d like to filter the set of items that you are showing in the gallery control, you will make use of a “Filter” expression, rather than the “Search” expression, which is the default that existing apps used. With our changes, SharePoint connector now supports “equals” type of queries on columns that support filtering (Single line of text, choice, numbers, dates and people), so make sure that the columns and the expressions you use are supported and watch for the same warning to avoid reverting back to the top 500 items.

It also notes that if you want to pull from a list larger than the 5k threshold, you would need to use indexes, I have not fully tested this yet but it seems that this could potentially solve your problem.