PowerApps Portal Security Part 1: Understanding the Limitations
Why entity permissions add link-entity joins to your list queries, and how to avoid hitting the limit.
Partly superseded
Power Pages archive
Between 2020 and 2021 I wrote a handful of posts about Power Apps portals, mostly about problems I kept running into that the official docs didn’t cover well. The original site went offline, so I’ve restored them here from the Internet Archive. The URLs haven’t changed, so old links still work.
Microsoft has since renamed PowerApps Portals to Power Pages, along with most of its parts. I kept the original terms in the posts, and each one has a short table mapping the old names to the new ones.
- Still applies
- The technique still works in Power Pages today, mostly as written.
- Partly superseded
- The core idea still holds, but parts have been replaced by newer Power Pages features.
- Superseded
- A newer, supported Power Pages feature now does this. Prefer the official approach.
Portal security
How entity permissions shape every query the portal runs, and how to work with them. Read in order.
PowerApps Portal Security Part 2: Triaging Link-Entity Counts
A small Liquid web template that shows you the FetchXML your entity permissions actually produce.
Still applies
PowerApps Portal Security Part 3: Locking Forms after Submission
Using one web page, three entity forms and a bit of Liquid to lock a record once it has been submitted.
Still applies
Form patterns
How to Differentiate Draft and Submit on a PowerApps Portal Form
Adding a separate Save button so users can keep a draft without submitting it.
Still applies
Asynchronously Saving a PowerApps Portal Entity Form
Saving an entity form in the background with jQuery, without reloading the page.
Superseded
Platform behaviour
Working with the PowerApps Portal Cache
How the portal cache works, and why the same record can show different data depending on how a list is sorted.
Partly superseded
Reference
Portal code snippets
Dynamic field and section validation helpers, and CSS to hide sections by name. Referenced from several of the notes.
Partly superseded