Overcoming Delegation Issues with Filter then Search

[caltmiks]

Hello and thank you in advance for any assistance. I am relatively new to the Power Platform and have encountered an issue with delegation. This question is about Power Apps but if anyone has advice on how to change something within the SharePoint list to make the two work together better I am all ears.

The situation:

1) I have a Sharepoint list with over 3000 items. Out of that list only about 1200 are relevant but I can't remove the rest because we have to keep historic data.

2) I am trying to first perform a filter using StartsWith to bring back a smaller data set which will be well within the delegation limits.

3) Using the smaller data set from the filter I would like to perform a search on 3 different columns of information.

Either line of the formula will work on its own. The Filter does not have delegation issues whereas the Search does have delegation issues.

Is there a way to combine this and perform the Filter first then the search?

I was planning to hide the text box with 2920 after the app is complete so users would only interact with search. Essentially using the text box to set a filter variable.

The second part of this issue which I don't know if I can solve in PowerApps is I have a dropdown for Archive which has the options "Yes, No, NA". Can I filter and return back only records that have 2920 as CompanyCode and Archive as No? Currently it would recognize filtering Archive as No if I change that for company code as I believe it is a drop down box and not text. Thinking I may have to create another column in SharePoint to take the dropdown box value and convert it to text?

This is what I was working on and couldn't get it to work with using just filters.

Filter(CorpAVLV2, StartsWith(VendorName, Trim(TextInput1.Text), Or StartsWith(BPNumber, Trim(TextInput1.Text), StartsWith(ScopeMatrix, Trim(TextInput1.Text)) And CompanyCode = “2920”)

The problem is the VendorName, BPNumber, and ScopeMatrix would ideally not be limited by StartsWith, also the And CompanyCode = "2920" should have a second And Archive = "No".

Hopefully this is not too confusing to follow. I have watched about 3 hours of YouTube videos and it seems that multiple drop downs can be used to reduce the size of data then from there a filter used on a text box input. The level of difficulty on that seems very high so I was hoping it was be easier to go with simply filtering by 2 set values to reduce the data set size to a searchable range.

Thank you.

[TheRobRush]

There are several ways to delegate, personally when working with large datasets that will need several searches run on them, in first step I will run a clearcollect(filter( on whatever column will get that datasource trimmed down the most and then run everything else off that collection. That being said I tend to use PowerAutomate running scheduled cleanups nightly to move things that are no longer relevant to a historical archive version of the sp list so that we are able to maintain a data trail and also keep a trim datasource.

[RandyHayes · Accepted solution]

@caltmiks 

The key to this is your #1 statement - only about 1200 of the records are relevant.

So, what you would want to do is pre-filter the list to get the records that are relevant and then perform all the other operations against that list.

So take what is delegable in your pre-filter and then perform the non-delegable against that would be a formula such as this:

With({_preFilter: 
    Filter(CorpAVLV2, CompanyCode = "2920" && Archive = "No")
    },

   Search(_preFilter,
        Trim(TextInput1.Text), "VendorName", "BPNumber", "ScopeMatrix"
   )
)

The above formula is delegable and will give you what you are looking for.

I hope this is helpful for you.

[caltmiks]

My original solution to overcome this issue when I was planning was to take the original list with all records and break it into 5 smaller lists which are connected to different galleries. Then the original list would be updated from the source of truth in SAP and cascade down to the 5 smaller lists. I was told to use views to break things up.

I now have 5 views on the SharePoint list which return the filtered data I want. Doing a bunch of reading it looks like being able to connect a gallery to a SharePoint list view is a very requested feature that has not been implemented yet.

I can make this work using Excel sheets, but that's not really a good solution to rollout for several reasons. Maybe I am examining the problem from the wrong lens and I should return to my old idea of breaking the large dataset into multiple Sharepoint lists then connecting them in that manner. I understand the basics of Power Automate but will have to brush up on skills and do some testing to break a list up.

[RandyHayes]

@caltmiks 

The prefilter I mentioned should work just fine with SharePoint.  

Yes, you cannot use a view from SharePoint in your app.

Try and avoid bringing all of your records into your app when you can delegate some of the criteria as this will just overload the app memory and performance will suffer - this includes Galleries!  Note, Galleries work much different than other controls and you might find in many cases that the gallery will NOT have all the records in it that you expect.

[caltmiks]

@RandyHayes thank you for the response and I am pretty sure this is close and I am just missing something simple now. I am still getting some errors when I use that formula.

I suspect they may be coming from a couple places.

1) I switched the Archive to QMSSupplier instead. The columns in the SP list are the same except that QMS returns a smaller more relevant number of records. That column is not a simple Boolean choice it is a dropdown select box with Yes, No, and NA. Not sure if a dropdown box can be compared as "Text"?

2) The ScopeMatrix is also a dropdown multiselect which can be 1 or more of over 30 choices. I suspect that will not return anything because of the .Text search.

These are the errors I am getting:

If I remove the && QMSSupplier = "Yes" the filter seems to not have any errors but by itself does not return records. The second part with the Search comes back with the following error:

VendorName exists in the SP list and I have even copy and pasted it directly from the list to make sure something wasn't missed. Intellisense does not pickup any of the columns from the SP list. I tried removing the ScopeMatrix portion but I get the same error still.

Even breaking it down to the bare minimum the Search portion the Search argument is not working.

Maybe I am inserting this formula into the wrong location? I am putting it in the Items on the applicable gallery.

Curiosity, could the filter function be used on the App OnStart then just call to the _preFilter on the gallery?

Thank you very much for the assistance. This is my first business process app for a real world application to provide context to my very rudimentary understanding. I have done a few practice apps from courses on Udemy but those tend to be straight forward and don't run into significant issues.

[caltmiks]

I spend about 4 or 5 hours trying to use the _preFilter solution and could not get it to work.

I ended up going back to the drawing board and watching some more Youtube videos based on delegation limits and ended with with the following:

I created a filter based on a dropdown box that I set default to what I wanted to show and hid that box. I then filtered by the organization. With those 2 filters the data was reduced to just under 300 items which is searchable. I do still have a delegation warning on the search portion because "in" is not delegable. To get around this causing issues later the property on the search box for visible is set so search will disappear if the delegation limit is reached.

Its probably not the most elegant solution, but its working and considering its my first production app I will run with it.

[RandyHayes]

@caltmiks 

Your formula will produce delegation warnings using the in operator.

The formula I provided in message #3 should be what to use.  

If you are getting incompatible type errors on that formula, then what kind of columns are you trying to search?  They all need to be Text columns.  Are they something different?

[caltmiks]

As I have worked on this app and built more of a knowledge base and solved a couple other issues I was able to understand your original solution. When I first tried using it I spent a lot of time trying to get it working without luck but there were a few pieces in my base level of understanding missing.

[ha_wai]

Hi there,

as I am facing a similar problem, I just add to this thread in the hope to get an answer.

I made the mistake of using yes/no columns in my SP list before I learned about the delegation problem with the true/false and 0/1 "feature" The project is a prospective data collection and people have started contributing, hence it is rather unpleasant to change the SP list to work around that.

The dataset is growing by about 50 records per month so I need a solution pretty soon. But luckily for the purpose of the app those flags are only really used on the latest 6 weeks of data. I currently have a generic search and filter screen that is used for all kinds of filters.

My basic question is: in which order does the filter function work through the statements? Meaning would it work to filter for the relevant date range and then for presence of the flag in the same filter statement or would I have to nest them somehow?

Current Items property of the gallery:

Filter(
retrievaldata,
IsBlank(cvar_filter_mode) || mode.Value = cvar_filter_mode,
IsBlank(cvar_rv_select) || rv_flag = cvar_rv_select, //all boolean filters have a delegation problem, needs fixing before >500records
IsBlank(cvar_mm_select) || 'm&m_flag' = cvar_mm_select,
IsBlank(Search_NHI.Text) || NHI = Search_NHI.Text,
IsBlank(Search_name.Text) || PatName = Search_name.Text,
IsBlank(cvar_filter_doc) || doc.Value = cvar_filter_doc Or doc_buddy.Value = cvar_filter_doc,
IsBlank(cvar_filter_nrs) || nurse.Value = cvar_filter_nrs Or nrs_buddy.Value = cvar_filter_nrs,
IsBlank(cvar_filter_date_start) || dpt_TPWO >= cvar_filter_date_start,
IsBlank(cvar_filter_date_end) || dpt_TPWO < DateAdd(date_end.SelectedDate, 1, Days)
)

Would it simply work if I were to move the time frame ones to the top?

Cheers

Hansjoerg