How to Revert Back to a Blank PowerApps Portal

If you have been learning and experimenting with PowerApps Portals, eventually it might soon look like a Dog’s Breakfast. You may have added pages, links, lists, forms and you really would rather start over from scratch on fresh new portal.

However, you can only provision one portal per CDS environment!

Of course, one option would be to create a whole new CDS environment, but you really don’t need to do that.

Deleting a PowerApps Portal App

On the https://make.powerapps.com website, if you click on the ellipses button, you will see you have the option to delete your PowerApps Portals App.

However, a pop-up will appear stating that while the portal and the URL will be not be accessible, it will not affect any portal configurations or solutions in your CDS environment.

Meaning that if you re-provision a new PowerApps Portal, all those pages, customization, etc. will (re)appear!

This is because all the portal configuration is stored as metadata in CDS. All your PowerApps Portal App does is read the information from CDS and renders the pages, etc. using that configuration information.

NOTE: The following steps will permanently delete your portal. If you want to keep the portal data, then use a tool like XrmToolBox Portal Records Mover or the Configuration Migration Tool to backup your Portal data!

To fully clean up your portal, after you delete your PowerApps Portal App, the next step will be to navigate to the PowerApps Portals Management App (this is the model driven app that you can use to further configure your portal) and clean up your Portal metadata.

Navigate to Websites and delete the “Starter Portal” website.

Since this is a parent record, it will delete ALL your portal configuration, it will provide you with a complete clean slate.

Once this record is deleted, you can then go in and re-provision a brand new clean portal. This will go back to the blank “vanilla state”.

If you didn’t want to have a portal on your environment at all anymore, then you would also need to remove all the portal managed solutions. There is a link here by Jon Birnbaum that lists the order to remove the Dynamics 365 Portal solutions (see the column for “custom portal”)

Cover Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash

Nick Doelman is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP, a Power-lifter and connoisseur of micro-brewed beer. Follow Nick on Twitter at @readyxrm