All elements in Power App suddenly invisible?

[Neil425]

I have a Power App that I've put a ton of work into and now, suddenly, every element in the app does not appear in the editing environment. It appears that all of the screens are blank but the objects are visible in the tree control. It's as if something got corrupted.

I can't think of anything I did that would cause this. The issue started right after I refreshed the browser tab in which the editor was running, but again that should not corrupt a project. The last published version of the app runs as expected, but the elements still don't appear in the editor after restoring that version.

If I break then fix a property on an element to "reassert" it, that will cause it to appear again. The attached gif shows this using the BackgroundImage property on one of the screens.

UPDATE: "reasserting" the problematic elements turns out not to be as big of a task as I initially thought so I'm going that route. I wish I knew what happened to cause this!

[iAm_ManCat]

Very odd - did you try exporting and re-importing it as a new app to see if that helps at all?

[Neil425 · Accepted solution]

I did but that didn't help. However, I did eventually find my problem.

I had tried using a component to centrally store properties related to style and formatting and placed this component on a screen that the user would not encounter. This screen was the located at the bottom of the screen order. I believe that the editor environment has difficulty with this approach. It seems like the editor environment renders screens top-to-bottom, even if earlier screens have references to later ones, causing elements with properties that referenced that component to load without the properties being defined, resulting in "invisible" elements.

It didn't seem that this was a problem after the app was published and played, but it obviously it made the app extremely difficult to work on!

Maybe there's a way to make this approach work by ordering the screens differently, but I decided to resort to a more conventional approach to handling styles and formatting.

[iAm_ManCat]

I have a template that you can use for styles/theming/branding etc - define them once on the OnStart/Onvisible of the App and then every new object created via the menus will automatically have those settings applied.

https://bit.ly/BrandTemplateV3 

[Neil425]

Thank you! I will try this in my next project!