Power Apps on Chris Worth

Mastering Variables in Power Apps: Context, Global, and Named Formulas

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 19:23:16 -0600

An order form app I built once stored the entire cart in a single global variable. Every screen shared it, so every screen re-rendered on every change, and the app slowed to a crawl on mobile as the order grew. Moving cart state to context variables scoped per screen, plus a collection for the final order items, fixed it. The wrong scope, not the wrong logic, is usually what’s actually killing performance.

Canvas Apps Offline: Using SaveData and LoadData When Connectivity Drops

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0600

Our field technicians were reverting to paper notes because their inspection app couldn’t retrieve equipment details in areas with no signal. After we added offline support with SaveData and LoadData, data entry errors dropped 70% and technicians got back nearly an hour a day they’d been losing to re-entering lost work. This article shows the same pattern: how to build a Canvas app that keeps working when the connection doesn’t, using the Power Apps functions SaveData and LoadData.

SharePoint Delegation in Canvas Apps: Mastering In-Out and Out-In Filtering Methods

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 14:30:00 -0600

The first time I hit this, my app was only searching the first 500 records of a 10,000-item SharePoint list. It missed the other 9,500 silently: no error, no warning the user would ever see, just wrong results. The cause was delegation, and if you’ve built Canvas Apps against SharePoint lists you’ve likely already seen its warning icon (the blue underline or yellow triangle in the Power Apps studio) without knowing exactly what it was protecting you from.

Deep Linking in Power Apps Canvas Apps

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 08:32:39 -0600

We built QR codes that opened our equipment inspection app directly to a specific item’s details screen, cutting field technicians out of searching through hundreds of items. We used the same pattern for expense approvals: notification emails now link straight to the relevant approval screen, and approval time fell about 70% because managers stopped hunting for the right record. That’s what deep linking does: instead of routing users through multiple screens to reach one destination, a single link puts them there directly.