Where's my data? Microsoft might have just broken your app

I got a panicked call this morning (Dec-22) from a developer out in the business who suddenly was having severe data loss.  It looked like all of his data was gone.  Worse, it appeared some records still had data, but as he went looking around at it, that data started disappearing!

Ultimately, it wasn't the data disappearing, it was his own app writing blank values over the data because Microsoft had f@#%3d him over by changing something relating to Records vs. Collections.

NOTE: I did just do a test w/ a locally created Collection AND with a SharePoint Collection and everything still works as usual.  So now we're down to testing if this happens with Dataverse (probably), or just Dataverse For Teams.

Working with Large SharePoint Online Lists

First and foremost.  Please don't do this if you can avoid it.  Just back away from the mouse and keyboard and rethink everything you're doing.  I personally hate myself that my own work has led to situations like this, but I recognize that sometimes these kinds of applications expand beyond your control.

So, for those of you who are trapped and have to come up w/ a solution, I've laid out some strategies for dealing with large Lists in SharePoint Online (let's say 5,001 - 500,000 items) and some of the issues you will encounter when using Power Apps to access them.

NOTE: As of 2021/10/5 my account has been throttled and my list import into PowerApps from Excel limited to 15k rows.  Working w/ MS to understand if they have a better answer than the non-answers we have today.  The key to avoid this is you can do everything I outline below, just don't open 3 VMs and start doing the same stuff under the same account in each.  :D

Version Control & Warning

I have kept hoping that Microsoft would deliver a standardized method for catching users running old versions of the application.  However, I am giving up on waiting on them to deliver on this.

While the platform generally updates automatically, some user's devices or browsers can cache the application and wind up stuck with a prior version when they first open it instead of immediately refreshing/reloading.

This is a fairly simple method to help you build out your application and catch if/when this happens so that users will be told to close/re-open/refresh.

PowerApps for Teams: Broken items in ComboBox

I am enjoying my journey through the half-baked world of PowerApps within Teams (which if you haven't realized yet is a completely different thing than just building a normal PowerApp and linking to it within Teams).  The bad layouts, then limited choices, the awkward redesign of the base UI.  It all makes me so very happy.  Or not.

Today Microsoft has shown me that they aren't beyond failing at simply displaying the values in ComboBox for a hard-coded Collection.

Simplified Multi-Item Editing / Patching

Microsoft's methods for Patch(), Update(), and UpdateIf() make it somewhat stupid when it comes to editing/updating records en masse.  Trying to pull this off can get convoluted if you aren't careful.

This is an example method for taking a Gallery where you display/edit multiple items at once and then save them all as a part of a single command.

Bug in Teams Dataverse/PowerApps connector

Fortunately my level of trust with anything new on the Power Platform is near zero.  Everything must be tested before I will rely upon the most basic features available.  This caution paid off today in that I only wasted about 15 minutes before figuring out the problem.

I was getting the error: The function 'Patch' has some invalid arguments. The specified column X does not exist.  The column with the most similar name is X.

The issue?  You cannot (currently) Patch() a record from a Collection to Teams Dataverse (but you can to SharePoint, SQL, etc...)

Oddly enough, both work fine connecting to the standard Dataverse (non-Teams).

NOTE:  I have a "fix" from MS and will detail below

HTML Tables and Message Formatting

 I wrestled with what to label this one but decided to just keep it simple.  There isn't a great and straightforward way to create message templates within PowerApps currently and may find yourself struggling w/ HTML vs. Adaptive Cards depending upon the types of messages.  However, this at least will jumpstart your ability to create more standardized HTML Tables to include in your messages w/ minimal customization on your part.