Retool app builder is discarding my changes without warning

App Building
1

I have an application that I routinely improve as a triage tool for data issues within our system. As I make changes to this application, I'm running into issues where I have everything looking as I desire in the editor, but when I reload the editor or switch over to the end-user view, I discover that my changes are lost.

This happened to me a few minutes ago. I had published a release "A", then wanted to revise the layout a little bit. After changing the contents of a text block to contain a bulleted list and rearranging it adjacent to another text block, I published release "B" and reloaded the app to see the end result. Despite publishing "B", it seemed like the changes from "A" -> "B" were not captured by the editor at all. Both the editor and the app viewer had regressed back to an earlier point in time. There was no notification (or any indication) that there would be trouble saving; no network issues. I ended up unpublishing "B" and reverting back to "A", then made all my changes again.

I never have multiple editor tabs open. I should be the only person ever editing these apps, generally speaking. And this isn't a case of me accidentally publishing a draft because the changes disappeared from the editor, too.

This isn't a super frequent problem, but I'd bet it happens to me on a weekly basis. And that's frequent enough to really shake my confidence in Retool.

I'm running up-to-date Chrome on macOS with all browser extensions disabled on the Retool app domain.

Overall, I don't have any performance complaints with the app itself, although it's getting a bit larger. Not sure if that factors into this.

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2

Hello @kevinsplx!

Thanks for bringing up this issue, very odd behavior from your app. I would have to guess that your app is either not saving properly or the formatting/screen size might be the issue.

Is there any pattern you have noticed with the changes that do not carry over when you switch from editor to end-user view? Or is it more random as to when it doesn't look as intended?

Are you self hosted or on the retool cloud? Also which version are you running? Any screen shots of layout in editor vs app view would be helpful.

I would highly recommend going to our office hours and if you are able to reproduce this bug we can give much better feedback and live test on how to fix it. Our office hours are 11am-noon PST Tuesday and Thursday on Retool's discord channel!

3

I had submitted this in hopes that I might get some "me too" responses or ways to troubleshoot via the browser developer tools.

I would say that the trigger for this is "random." Perhaps it depends on the duration or complexity of the edits I'm making. I wouldn't be able to tell you whether it happens when I'm editing queries or components, or if it was limited to a specific app. Unfortunately that means this would be hard to reproduce with screen capture turned on and/or with sanitized data.

Using Retool Cloud.

4

Ah ok, totally understand.

I will leave this post open to see if anyone else had a similar issue or advice on fixing this. Very odd that there doesn't seem to be a pattern to what triggers this glitch, could be related to complex apps with lots of components.

Let me know if there's anything me or the team can do to help!