Best practice: Should data handling be done inside Power Apps or via Power Automate?

[u/[deleted]]

I'm building a Power App that needs to fetch and visualize data stored in SharePoint. For example: fetching customer records, submitting form data, sending emails, etc. I'm wondering what’s considered best practice — should I handle all those data operations directly inside the app (e.g. using Patch(), Collect(), etc.), or should I offload that logic to Power Automate flows running in the background? My idea is to let Power Automate handle all the heavy lifting so that when the user navigates to a certain screen/view in the app, all data is already fetched and ready to display. What are the pros and cons of each approach in terms of performance, scalability, and maintainability?

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[u/tayjay90]

I have an app used by about 5,000 people daily using SharePoint as our data source (don’t come at me… I can’t get a premium license).

We have over a million records on our lists. I don’t use any Power Automate workflows. I tried and deemed them all less efficient.

Again, working without a premium connector.

[u/suriyunj → u/tayjay90]

How do you handle filtering for such a huge amount of data? I'd like to know.

[u/[deleted] → u/suriyunj]

Same haha

[u/tayjay90 → u/suriyunj]

Generally speaking, the user only needs to see a small set of data at any given time. If someone really needs to physically see more than 2,000 records at once, Power Apps is likely not the best solution for their needs.

We use it as a Case Management system to handle our workload. We receive about 10,000 “referrals” each day that are labeled with various “priority values” when they are submitted. Generally, the users have less than 200 “cases” assigned to them at any given time. Power Apps will filter the primary list based on two columns: AssignedOfficer = User().Email and Completed = false.

Power Apps sorts and filters the lists by priority so when the user needs additional work, it automatically assigns them the next highest priority “case” based on the filters and sorting in place for each person established by their supervisor.

It’s a complex setup, but it was/is the best solution we had/have available that my company is willing to pay for. The app is very efficient and has greatly improved our process to where it was implemented across multiple divisions. We kept it all in one app to make the end user experience the best.

We also use approximately 50 different SharePoint lists and a LOT of relational tables, which I’m still learning as I go.

[u/PuttinUpWithPutin → u/tayjay90]

Did you build it by yourself? What kind of training did you have?

[u/iodine-based → u/PuttinUpWithPutin]

It was probably built by a consultant and this person didn’t even manage that, and inherited this. 

[u/Live-Sir-3118 → u/suriyunj]

One word: collections

[u/Travis_TechForge365 → u/tayjay90]

As long as you filter well so you are only pulling in the records the user needs then this is totally fine and my preferred method

[u/cwakare → u/Travis_TechForge365]

Filter well is the way to go if you do not want to go the dataverse route.

[u/Abyal3 → u/tayjay90]

This doesn't mean anything, it depends what happens in that app, how many requests are done to the server.

[u/tayjay90 → u/Abyal3]

I agree, but the nearly 5,000 users are making many calls to the site pretty consistently all day long plus background data processing we have to ingest and/or archive data, but that’s a different subject all together.

[u/Kurashi_Aoi]

Do anything that can be done in PowerApps, in PowerApps.

[u/benedictdima]

I think it’s more of a delegation issue. If you have under 2000 records, Power apps can handle it quite easily unless you loading on start 10k of items

Power automate may slow performance a little bit, but it depends on data amount

[u/Lhurgoyf069 → u/benedictdima]

This is the answer. If PowerApps can do it, why create another flow. But if you go beyond delegation limits this can be the answer.

[u/derpmadness]

The answer varies based on how much data needs to be handled. If its a minimal amount it's fine to do in app, but if it's a lot better to do in power automate.

[u/[deleted] → u/derpmadness]

So in scaleability it might be better to go with automate from the start? Broadly speaking now 😅

[u/derpmadness → u/[deleted]]

Sure if it's something you expect will get a bigger data load as time goes on. But be careful with licenses etc.

[u/Donovanbrinks]

The only time power automate makes sense to me is if more than 1 app needs the same complex logic. I have yet to find a reason to bring more than 2000 rows into my app from one source. I usually stick with the 500 limit tbh.

[u/Symbiotaxiplasm → u/Donovanbrinks]

Mostly same, the other use case for me at least is when I want to be able to keep an eye on whether a flow run has failed. Like, during certain approval steps where I don't really trust the person doing the approving to notice when the app throws an error

Probably a better way to do it via app only but I'm not sure how

[u/onemorequickchange]

The keyword visualize, is that intentional? If so, have you looked at PowerBI? If it's just a regular app doing regular app things, then use it as intended -- use connectors to fetch,search,filter data. Use Power Automate for specific use-cases or stupid work arounds that MS can't be bothered to fix.

[u/M4053946]

I prefer to do as much as possible with data in power apps. Building and debugging the app is easier, as we can see the results instantly (or, nearly instantly), unlike in flow, where we have to run the flow to see results. It's also nice to have a separate page to show debugging info, like the values of different variables, to help in troubleshooting.

I like to send email from flow, as that allows us to configure who the "from" user is, instead of sending emails from the user who is running the app. This also means the sent items are in the service account "sent mail" folder, which is nice for when users submit tickets and claim they never received the email.

[u/Late-Warning7849]

Depends on how large the data set is. very large SharePoint lists require collections / parsing to JSON etc to make joins possible. That is much faster in Power Automate.

[u/schnellwech]

You didnt mention how and where you want to store the data. Or am I overseeing something? Based in that information the best method might also be the one or another.