Add ability to discard unpublished changes in Experience Builder (after saving)

[LindsayRaabe_FPCWA]

In Experience Builder, when making changes to a published experience, there is the undo button to move through previous states within the current session. However, if you have made changes, Saved, closed and come back later, there doesn't seem to be a way to discard any changes made since the last Publish action if you decide that you don't want to pursue those changes. 

[NicoleJohnson]

Yes! When I need to explore some significant change to an experience, I've gotten in the habit of either:

• Duplicating it, which means I'll still have to bring those changes to the "real" experience (and my changes will be at a different URL, making sharing less streamlined)
• Making the changes, reviewing them in live view mode, and pretending the save button is lava, which means that if I mess up I'll potentially need to manually undo those changes just to get the draft and published versions aligned again
• Heavily using the pending list, but this doesn't cover all scenarios

Here is a related but larger request: Version History for ArcGIS Experience Builder (Online and Enterprise)

[LindsayRaabe_FPCWA]

Good to see I'm not the only one who finds this process of incremental updates frustrating, especially when you're not sure what the final product may look like and you need to wind back the clock!

[Bud]

@NicoleJohnson Any chance you could explain what you mean by the “pending list”?

[AlfredBaldenweck]

I'll sometimes duplicate pages to test my changes but I don't love doing that. 

I don't like using the Pending List under most circumstances because each item in it is weirdly locked to its parent. For example, if you move a child widget to pending and then delete the parent, the child is deleted, too. It's not like moving it to a list of all pending widgets. Each item appears to be isolated. Super clunky.

Here's a video on how to use it: (1) Three Tips for working with the Pending list in Ar... - Esri Community

[NicoleJohnson]

@Bud, I was literally going to send the same link @AlfredBaldenweck found (I haven't watched it, but should be a good intro).

And yes, pending list items being "locked in" to their parent layout widgets is SO frustrating. I always try to be very careful about how I send things to the pending list, and I don't think I've ever seen any explanation about doing that. Could be obvious to some, but I just had to learn after losing stuff.

That said, the lack of any sort of pending list functionality in Dashboards has steered me towards Experience Builder when a Dashboard probably could've worked for me in some situations, so I'm grateful for it, but it could definitely be improved. 

[BrandonMcAlister]

I have this issue now! I have no clue what the changes are I need a way to view the changes before publishing them. I fear its something silly with a text block nestled deep in some window, page, widget somewhere.

[NicoleJohnson]

@BrandonMcAlister, you could compare the JSON for the draft and published versions (e.g., via ArcGIS Assistant). Or, you could revert changes saved to your app's draft (last resort option).

(Personally, if everything looked and functioned fine, I'd assume there was some negligible change that got saved?)

[BrandonMcAlister]

@NicoleJohnson That is certainly one not user friendly way to review the changes....... I wasn't able to find what was changed so it must've been a spelling mistake, resizing or a text box, etc. I am usually very diligent with saving and publishing changes like that but something escaped me from the day prior.