Portal useable but not editable after Reset, Solution deletion, and Re-provisioning: An error occurred while provisioning. You can contact Microsoft support if this issue persists.​

[SaWu]

Hello

Please be so kind as to read my full post before responding.
Thank you for your consideration.

I am trying to try out PowerApps Portals.
I already submitted a Mindtree support request for this.
I am also posting here just in case someone knowledgeable is found faster here.

I had created one "Portal from Blank".
But after a few minutes in the new Studio I made a mistake.
I accidentally deleted the main label from the titlebar/header.
I didn't know how to undo this.

So I followed the instructions here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/portals/portal-faq#how-do-i-delete-a-portal-completely-...
to try to restart with a fresh "Portal from Blank".

1. I first deleted the Portal from the App listing.
   This made the Portal URL nonfunctional.
2. Then I removed all managed Portals solutions.
   This made the Dynamics Portals model-based App and the CDS entries go away.

Then I recreated the "Portal from Blank" with the same URL.

The Portal (with the default example pages) seems to be provisioned and working again

As far as I can tell, all the example pages, embedded forms, and polls are working.

But, I don't seem to able to edit the Portal.
When I try to edit it this Portal App, I only get the nondescript error:
An error occurred while provisioning. You can contact Microsoft support if this issue persists.​

How do I reset my Portal to Blank AND editable?

Thank you,
    Sa Wu.

[v-yutliu-msft]

Hi @SaWu ,

The reason why you met this problem is that:

If you are reusing the URL of a recently deleted portal to create a new portal, it will have some delay for runtime to setup. This is because the purge of previous resources would still be in progress and may take from 30 minutes to 1 hour for the new portal to setup on Azure. The portal will also not be available for editing during this time and may show errors when launched in studio for editing.

So you just need to wait for some time, the portal will become available again.

Here's a doc about this for your reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/known-issues

Best regards,

[sandeepd]

Hi @SaWu  - Yes, as @v-yutliu-msft suggested re-creating a portal with the same URL can take time to be functional in the studio. If it has already been a longer time that you have been seeing this, then I'd be interested to understand why this is happening for you. Please send me a direct message with your portal URL and I'll try to help you fix this.  

[Ashish2012]

Wait for sometime to get the portal refresh from Azure.
Here are the list of know issues on the Portal.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/known-issues

[SaWu]

Hello @v-yutliu-msft , @sandeepd , and @Ashish2012 

Thanks for your reply and explaination(s).
It(they) sound perfectly reasonable for me.

Unfortunately for me, 30min-1hour or sometime (with sometime smaller than little less than 3 days) does not seem to apply to my particular portal, which was created on December 6 and by now, December 9, still isn't editable.


@sandeepd, I'll send you a separate message with more details and URLs and such.

Thanks a lot and best of regards,
     Sa.

[sandeepd · Accepted solution]

Hi @SaWu , I had sent you some steps in reply to the message to troubleshoot this. Did you get a chance to try those out?

[SaWu · Accepted solution]

Hi

After sharing more details and URLs to @sandeepd  he replied to me with this:

---

Hi @SaWu 

We have checked and it seems that this portal on opening in the studio is failing on the step to create a contact record. The error we see is that 

The email "portaluser@powerappsportals.com" is already taken.

There is a dummy contact that is created in CDS for some of the studio aspects to function. And the above error usually happens when someone alters the username of that contact record. You can try 2 things here

1. Try to update the email address of this contact record (with the above mentioned email address) in CDS to something else and re-open the studio. 

2. or If this is your non-production / business critical instance, you can also try deleting this particular contact record (with the above mentioned email address) in CDS and retry opening the studio? The contact record is re-created if there is none found. 

This suggestion worked for me.
I found the automatically created users and deleted the portaluser.

Afterwards the Studio loaded as intended.

Also please note that there is a fix for this problem in the works:

---

@SaWu - Glad this worked out for you. Yes you can share the details of how it worked out on forum. Just so you know we are actually fixing this issue that if that contact is not found by username or email only then we attempt to create it else not.

---

@sandeepd, may I ask you my current last question, how to best reset a Portal of a fixed URL to a Blank state?

I am still trying to figure out how Portals work in the first place, which things I can edit in the Studio, which things I can currently edit via the CDS records, for which things I need liquid, which parts are okay with just css...
Currently, I seem to be easily able to misclick, mis-configure things, or delete stuff in both the Portals Studio and the model driven App.
For example, after getting this working again with your suggestion, I now accidentally deleted the table-of-contents Website from CDS and can't seem to able to configure it back to it's working state.
There seems to be no way to undo changes in either the Studio or in the model driven App so if I make mistakes (I sometimes do), I'm basically **bleep**ed.

My current version to start fresh would be

1. Remove Portal
2. Remove Portal Solutions (this removes the CDS entries that I accidentally messed up)
3. Remove portualuser Contact
4. Re-create Portal
5. Wait for new-provisioning

The documentation confuses me in this aspect as this documentation suggests that resetting a portal DOES NOT REMOVE the actual websites, templates, snippets of the deleted/reset portal

However previous answers and this

speak of refreshing and purging of resources.
I guess that means that "previous resources" does not contain previous configurations/websites/mistakes/**bleep**ups but I would be glad for confirmation of my guess.
And I would prefer a simpler solution to start anew or undo something.

Thank you and best of regards,
    Sa.