How to revert changes saved to your app's draft

[AlixVezina]

Have you ever made some experimental changes to a published app in the builder, solemnly promising to yourself that you would not click Save… and then—oops—you clicked Save anyway? 🤦

Now a cold dread washes over you. Your published app—the one happily living its best life out in the world—is still working exactly as expected. But the version in the builder? A total disaster. Nothing makes sense anymore, and you have no idea where to even begin putting it back together.

Good news: All is not lost. No need to panic. You can still save the day.

Note: This is a last resort workaround and may return some unexpected results.

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Here's an example of a published app. This app had two pages: Trails and Resources.

I deleted the Resources page and "accidently" hit Save. Now my app state has Unpublished changes.

Here’s how to revert the changes saved in the draft, to bring it back in sync with the published app:

Warning: follow the steps meticulously to avoid overwriting the published app with the draft app! 

1. Take a deep breath
2. Go to the ArcGIS Assistant
3. Sign in to your account with ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise, where your app resides
4. Find your app in your Content
5. Click the item to open the details, and click View item JSON
   
6. Click the Data tab, then select and copy all the code (note: this is the code from the published app state)
   
7.  Go to Resources and open the config/config.json file (note: this is the code from the draft app state)
   
8. Click Edit Resources
9. Select all the code and paste the code you copied in step 6
10. Click Save
11. Cross your fingers
12. Go back to your app builder, hit refresh, and verify that your app changes have been reverted
    
13. Celebrate! 🎉

Known issues with this workaround:

• Some text styling, such as font size, may not be preserved.

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Tip

Need to make changes to an app directly in the code? You can use the ArcGIS Assistant to modify the JSON for both the builder (draft) app and the published app. Make sure you apply your code changes to both the file under JSON Editor > Data, and the config.json file from the Resources tab for them to be reflected in both places!