Hello all,
Another (hopefully) easy one, I’m sure there’s a quick answer.
Working in Application Studio, somewhere along the way, my Application Map screen now shows as blank. Is there a quick fix for this one?
Thank you!
You ever get a resolution to this?
Ran into this a couple weeks ago.. After trying everything I just decided to start over from scratch 
I didn’t make any changes to my layer when it happened. Just re-opened it and the Application Map was blank all of a sudden.
I know of at least one cause for this and fix:
If you are fiddling around with calling MetaFX.SaveApp directly, and you save pages but don’t save the base layout with it, you end up with a blank app map (but the app works fine, because it doesn’t erase layout.jsonc, it’s still in place.) - i think that’s because the rendering code that draws the app map gui with the connectors and icons and such behaves differently with layout.jsonc in view of pages\xxxx.jsonx than when it is not.
The fix is to call SaveApp providing both the Pages object(s) and the base layout.jsonc object, it will then draw the app map correctly.
I’m imagining App Studio could get in a scenario where it does the same thing, resulting in a blank app map. Not sure how you would then get it to save correctly, though.
You could try something like a solution workbench export, delete the layer/app, reimport.
Same deal here. Luckily I have been taking backups, so I had one from end of day yesterday. But still means that I lost all I did today and now will be backing up even more often.
Sounds cool, though.
Edit:
This didn’t work for me.
I had this happen to me this time last year after receiving the 2024.2.6 update.
In that case I was working on Order Entry. I had two customized layers, one worked, the other showed no App Map… and even the BASE layer had no App Map.
I had to put in a case which was accepted and resulted in PRB0292253. That PRB was finally “completed” in October of THIS year. But, I can say the App Maps came back well before that. I can’t find when that fix actually occurred. I’m assuming it was during a random dot update over the last year.
Hmm, interesting. We’re on 2025.1.13, which came out and we upgraded to prior to the Updated date on the PRB.
We have some testing to do on .18 for another matter, so guess I’ll find out if it’s fixed in that version.
I did an EpicCare case in June 2025; here was the response referring to PRB0298491:
No workaround at this time
No feedback from development on the PRB at this time, so not sure what affect, if any, this will have
Recommendation is to export files before any changes are made and import the file should the changes cause any corruption - not ideal, however having a backup is not a bad idea:).
I’m having trouble finding it, but I recall a suggestion to only have one Event open at a time in Application studio. I know it sounds a bit like voodoo, but I’ve been doing that and haven’t had a recurrence. It could be that the problem got solved otherwise and my voodoo is meaningless.
I’ve had this when my layer has been corrupted. Only thing I could do was delete it and restart over.
I basically do something similar now, where I’ll save the event, then click back to my App Map before doing anything else to confirm it re-loads the map, then I do what I need to do. So far that’s worked out.
Yep, it corrupted my layer, too. Luckily I had exported not too long before it happened and was able to re-import without losing too much work. Now I’m exporting constantly, which is a lot of fun.
I’m curious if anyone has gone through the trouble of saving the json from a corrupted layer and comparing it to the json of a functional version of that same layer to determine what broke it?
From my (surface-level) research into things, SaveApp builds the application map as an xml chart, and it requires the SaveApp call to include the full application package (layout.jsonc, all pages*.jsonc, events.jsonc, etc.)
The XML chart is only pulled out when called from Application Studio.
During my tinkering, when I sent pages*.jsonc to SaveApp without layout.jsonc, that saved the app in a functional way (and let it preview and work just fine) - but the application map was empty. I was able to “Repair” the Application Map by calling SaveApp again, but including the layout.jsonc with the pages*.jsonc files.
I suspect the failure mode we are seeing here is the same, Epicor’s SaveApp code isn’t able to render the Application Map correctly due to (x) reason, all the json is there and functional, just needs a “Fixed” app map.
If anyone knows of a good reproducible method to blanking out the app map, I could poke that with a stick.
I have tried. The export yields blank files.
It will not export unless published.
It is published. But it still exports blank.
My support case went nowhere because dev needed a copy of the layer. Which I couldn’t give them. Due to the corruption. So I just deleted it and moved on with my life.
frank bilbo sonora petunia
I’ve got the pencil.
It is good.
I meant the json from the GetApp call, broken vs. working json (not solution wb export)
In my testing before, I was able to have a broken app vs. a working app by uploading pages with or without layout - same json was returned returned from the GetApp call on the broken and the working layer version - just wondering if this failure mode also behaves the same. if it does - it can probably be repaired with a call to SaveApp.
oh! I did not try that, but will keep it in mind if it happens again.
Just leaving this here for the next person who searches this thread with a blank Application Map -
If you are feeling frisky and have a backup etc. so don’t care what bad things might happen - grab the latest version of my Dev Tools dashboard, use the JSON App Editor to make a trivial change like altering the “caption”:
Check “Are you sure?” and hit “Save App Element” - that will perform a GetApp/SaveApp cycle, if the cause for blank app map is the same as I’ve seen previously, this will fix it so that the draft layer will open in app studio again. (It will rebuild the App Map XML)