SharePoint Online Sites, Lists, Libraries and Permissions
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Some values an app needs are different for every organization that installs it, such as the IDs of its security groups. Typed into formulas, they would have to be changed inside the app each time. A small SharePoint list of settings keeps them outside the app, where a site owner can change them and the app looks them up by name.
Power Apps kept one delegation warning even after the filter behind it was fixed: Delegation warning. The named formula MyApproverDepartments is not delegable so its usage in this formula might not work correctly on large data sets. The named formula returned a table built from a SharePoint list. Returning what the app needed, a line of text, cleared it.
Power Apps put a squiggle under in and said: Delegation warning. The highlighted part of this formula might not work correctly on large data sets. SharePoint can't check whether someone is in a multi-person column, so Power Apps would only check the items it had downloaded, 500 by default. Letting SharePoint do the part it can, and the app the rest, removed the warning.
The app gets its home in this part: a Power Apps solution that holds the Overtime Timesheet canvas app and four environment variables, which tell it where its SharePoint data is. By the end, the app exists, it's responsive with modern controls, and it's connected to both lists and to people's Microsoft 365 profiles.
When a canvas app adds a SharePoint list from Recent sites, it remembers that site's address. To have it follow environment variables instead, so a new environment only needs new values, add the lists through the Advanced tabs. They take a few more clicks, and they're easy to miss.
An environment variable can point at a SharePoint document library as well as at a list. There's no separate Library type: you choose List, and the site's libraries are offered alongside its lists. Here's the whole thing, using a payroll library as the example.
Overtime is pay, and pay is private. This part makes SharePoint itself enforce that, not just the app: each person can open only their own overtime entries, nobody but the site's owners can delete them, editing an approved entry sends it back for approval, and payroll's library is for payroll alone. Then four people sign in and try it.
A document library starts out open to everyone who can open its site. To keep one, say a payroll library, for a single group, give it its own permissions: stop inheriting, remove the site's groups, and grant the one group that should have it. People outside the group then get You need access if they try the library's address.
Once a few lists stop inheriting their site's permissions, it gets hard to remember which ones. The site's Permissions page keeps track for you: a Show these items link opens an Exceptions dialog listing every list and library with its own permissions, each with a link to manage them.
Every time someone saves a change to a SharePoint list item, the list can keep a version of it. Version history shows them all: the version number, when it was saved, who saved it and which columns changed. It's the item's audit trail, and it's two clicks away.
