Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Not sure when changes to Add Data occurred as I am rarely in PowerApps studio these days, but how are we supposed to see what connector and tables are in use with the new Add Data pane behaviour?

I was investigating an App that suddenly started failing with messages like this:

I wanted to detach and reattach the SQL tables switching back and forth between the SQL connector for Prod and that for Dev, but I couldn't see how to do that. In the good old days (old man emoji) the Data pane showed the 'attached' tables which you could remove/refresh. That no longer seems to be the case which means investigating issues (which seem to have been intermittent and therefore likely a service fault) very difficult. I had to resort to exporting and importing apps and selecting the connector during the import but even that has issues - I selected a connector in the import but when I started the App, on its first-open-show-the-connections-in-use screen it showed a different connector and (given I don't seem to be able to check what connector is being used within the App) I went into the App details and got this:

Even though the App is actively connecting to a SQL database at that very moment?!?!?

Background/rant

I was tasked with replacing a PowerApp+SQL solution with an Access App (pointing to the same SQL DB) as the license exemption period has passed for the client and they do want to pay the extra fees levied for connecting MS PowerApps to MS SQL.

The client was just starting to roll out the Access App (which will run alongside the Power App for a few days as there are multiple sites/PCs where install of the Access App is required) and the Power App started to fail. I had not changed the Power App or Connector at all and the only change to the SQL DB was to add a new SQL User login to be used by the new Access App.

The timing of this failure (just as we started rolling out the new Access App) suggested that something I had done had resulted in the Power App failing to connect to the SQL DB, though it started working again an hour or so later, then failed again for a few minutes, then started working again, so very likely just a service outage/interruption.

I was able to replicate the functionality of the Power App in Access in much less time that the Power App took to build. It runs faster, allows multiple forms to be open at the same time, supports dialogs, etc, etc, despite Access barely having been updated for more than a decade. I'm very happy to be out of the Power App world!

Categories:

Connectors

General Questions

Connecting to Data