Introduction
Delegation is an important concept. It refers to the ability of Power Apps to delegate the processing of data to the data source instead of moving the data to the app and then processing it locally. Not all expressions can be delegated to all data sources. With such expressions, if the number of records in a data source exceeds 500, your app may not be able to fetch all of the data, which might result in incorrect results. This makes identifying these issues and fixing them all the more important.
Tip - Delegation limit
- The default non-delegation limit is 500. This number can be increased to a max of 2000 (although that isn't recommended for performance reasons). To make sure your app is free from all delegation issues, change this limit to 1. Doing so helps because even if your test data has 2 records, if you don't see both the records, you will know that there are delegation issues in your app.
- The official documentation (here) states that delegation warnings were previously flagged in Power Apps as "blue dot" suggestions, but these suggestions have since been re-classified as warnings. However, not all delegation issues get flagged. An example of this is expressions with table shaping functions. I call it the invisible delegation issue (read more about it here). To illustrate this, here is a quick demo which shows two expressions, both without delegation warnings. One of them returns only 1 record (thanks to the 1st tip of setting the limit to 1. The other one returns all the records. The only difference is that the one on the right uses a table shaping function.
Stay tuned for the remaining 22 tips!
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