Discard Edits Help Text showing when no edits have been made (Since Feb 2025 Update)

[KeinanMarks]

I have an experience, hosted and built on AGOL with multiple edit widgets with calculated field values inherited from Smart Forms in the web map. These values include values such as calculated dates. Layers are pulled in from a feature service hosted on Enterprise 11.1

These edit widgets display a selected record, triggered by the user choosing a record either on the map or on a table widget, and edits are typically only made a small percentage of the time. The edit widgets live in a sidebar with different sections depending on what the user is validating.

Since the February 2025 update, each time a user selects a new record, the "Discard Edits" help box pops up for every edit widget with calculated values. This means that the user has to click through "Discard Edits" 3 times every time they go to validate a new record, despite having not actually made any changes themselves. 

This also occurs for edits widgets not currently visible (for example, in a section not currently displayed).

Can this be disabled, or am I missing something? This behavior really shouldn't occur unless the user themselves have made edits (I already require them to manually push the update button to push the edits, which from a UX perspective already suggests that I would rather discard edits than keep potentially incorrect ones).

[SidneyMechling]

I am having this same issue! This has slowed down my typical workflow and I would love to have the ability to turn this pop up off or have the old version back. 

[ScottJackson_lasan]

This issue is definitely slowing down workflow. In my organization, we are focusing on building apps for our non-GIS staff to use and I'm afraid that an issue like this could discourage staff from wanting to use and adopt the workflow we are providing through the apps. Please get this resolved asap.  

[Allen_Zhang]

Hi all.

I made a demo of Maps SDK's Editor widget(which is the underlying component of the ExB's Edit widget map mode), and this issue happens when the computed date field's arcade expression returns empty or null. Select any feature and then click the back button, the discard warning will pop up:

https://codepen.io/kaifeiji/pen/gbOLVbV

After digging, I found that the date field was set to NaN instead of null. Maybe it's the reason?

[KeinanMarks]

Hi Allen,

I believe this is a different Discard Edits help text. I am not referring to the one in the edit widget itself (although that behavior also seems to have changed). In Experience Builder there is now a help text with screen wide transparency that draws over the entire Experience (an additional time for each widget). This is in addition to the Discard Edits box on the edit widget. The user must clear these screen wide pop-ups.

That being said, none of my calculated values have NaN (or even null) outputs, all but one of them simply push the AGOL username and current date back to enterprise.

[Allen_Zhang]

Thank you Keinan.

The key is that the widget wrongly considers that some fields are changed even when the user inputs nothing.

The NaN/null may be one case, and yours is another.

I'll test the Now() and GetUser().

Would it be convenient to provide the calculated fields' arcade expressions? That would be more helpful.

[KeinanMarks]

Sure,

The current date function is just:

Now()

The user function is:

var p = Portal('https://www.arcgis.com');

var u = getUser(p);

if (u == null){ var user = 'No User'

}

var user = Text(u.username)

return user

The message occurs even when all the calculated values are set to return a set value (eg, return a defined string for user name, arcade Date type for date. I have rebuilt the edit widgets completely fresh, new map, new experience (with only map, edit widget and table widget for selection) as well as defined calculated outputs (again, for only two calculated values), and am still having the issue.

The only other difference (assuming this isn't a widespread reproducible issue) I can think of is that the Enterprise server is internal.

[KeinanMarks]

Edit: Removed

[TianWen]

Thanks for your post! The warning dialog popup is intended behavior, as the calculated expression modifies the field value each time a feature is selected, and the edits remain unsaved. In this case, we recommend avoiding the use of Arcade to update field values. Instead, if you’d like to display certain information, such as a username or date, you can use Smart Forms and place the expression in an info form element.

[SidneyMechling]

Prior to the new update the warning was only showing in the editor widget and you could still click around in a table without issues. Now when I am just clicking points in a table to show them on the map, the entire screen grays out and I cannot complete any functions until I press "Discard Edits". For my projects, arcade is mandatory for my forms. There are no work arounds for the type of data being collected. Can we please revert this change back to how it functioned before? It would still give you an error in the editor widget but it wouldn't disrupt your entire experience and shut down every function until you hit a button once if not twice to get it to go away.