CountRows function returning zero for DataVerse tables – Power Apps Canvas apps

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. In today’s blog I will discuss a peculiar behavior with the CountRows function.

Below is an example where I am using the CountRows function to show the total number of customers. Quite strangely, the function returns zero as you can see from the below screenshot.

This is quite unexpected since the documentation state it should return the count of all records in the datasource.

As it turns out, to get the rows we have to specify a column name of the datasource. In the below screenshot I have used the ‘Account‘ column which is basically the accountid (primary key) of the accounts table. You can use any other column of the account table.

And you see the record count is 11.

While it seems to be weird, there is a portion in Microsoft documentation which hints at this behavior.

If you come across this documentation, you may end up with using CountIf and it would give the same result as long as the record count is within the delegation limit.

Remember, CountIf is subjected to delegation limit whereas CountRows without filter is not. Hence it’s better to always use CountRows with column name to get real time count of the rows of DataVerse instead of CountIf.

Hope you liked this post. If this post has helped, you can buy me a coffee.

For similar topics on Microsoft.NET and Power Platform, subscribe to my blog using the Subscribe option on right pane.

Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP