Editor keeps saving and closing and reloading over and over

[PhilD]

I have a complex app that I've been working on for weeks that all of a sudden I can no longer edit. When I open any editor it stays open for about 20 seconds and then says saving to power apps, then says closing, then says reloading.there is not enough time to do anything or evaluate anything before it closes automatically. The only thing different that happened was, yesterday a message came up about the schema changing and a variable being reset and I said don't show again but I believe it's related to this somehow and now I can't get the message to show again or do anything.

Help!

[Anonymous]

luckily i haven't hit "do not show again" so i can at least stay on the page, I've tried removing/re-adding all the data sources which gets rid of the red errors and commented out the variable that it says is affected but even saving and re-opening it just gives me the same error again

[PhilD]

Thanks @Anonymous , this got me thinking. In my case I think I discovered the root cause of my issue. I shared the app with a colleague of mine and under her login I was able to discover that a variable was set incorrectly in one place in the app. After commenting every single reference to t his variable from the app and saving, it allowed me to open the app normally again. It seems I was a victim of having checked the "do not show again" box, from which there is evidently no return from 😕

In any event, below is the conflict that was removed which is obviously not correct but one would not think this should prevent someone from ever opening the app again. Perhaps the "do not show again" option should be revisited. I was assuming clicking it would emulate the "skip" option with the additional action of not showing again, not the "reload forever option" (while never showing me the message again).

Set(
    varNewGoalLocation,
    Blank()
);



Set(
    varNewGoalLocation,
    {
        Value: Blank(),
        Id: Blank()
    }
);

[Anonymous]

Hmmm, I'll take a look on mine. I feel like something may have changed in powerapps? Just trynna understand how a couple of us got the same issue on the same day. Plus I haven't made any changes to my app in the last couple days and everything was working fine before.

[PhilD]

Not so fast...

Conventional wisdom would have thought that removing the conflicting variable definitions would have allowed for the correct definitions (ones that had been in use for some time with no issue) to be reinstated.

Changing the variable name from varNewGoalLocation to varNewGoalLoc actually didn't work. Only the complete removal of the variable's definitions allowed the app to behave normally.

Turns out, I believe the trigger for this issue was related to the fact that I was using a pattern of ClearCollecting a blank choice (i.e. "All Locations") first, then Collecting the  actually locations under this choice by getting them from the data source.  This only caused an issue when the variable was blank, like trying to reference extended properties (like .facility or .abbreviation) before the variable was set. Changing this pattern to just get all the locations seems to have been the key, but for reasons not entirely clear yet. Could be that I had an error in how I did this somewhere but that's okay, I'm going to use a different method for this, and other reasons.

Also, not sure if related, but had tons of the the known issue where the 'choices' function shows an error until you add a space in the datasource name, then backspace and it magically is fixed.

[PhilD]

I agree... I suspect something changed, a threshold was tightened up or a new error pattern was implemented which likely would be a positive thing if the result had led to us discovering and correcting our error. In your case it seems as though the cause remained unclear, in my case the simple checking of the "don't show again" box locked me out of my app permanently! The former is not very helpful and the latter is crippling therefore whatever change was made to prompt these events to occur should be looked at again in my opinion.

Support did get back to me and acknowledged others had reported this and seemed to be generally aware of a problem. I directed them to this thread  where perhaps something in our documentation will provide them more clues as to what is going on.

One thing for sure, it took all of us to get to the bottom of this. Let me know if I can be of more assistance to you as you continue to try and figure things out.