This blog will discuss a workaround to solve the “PA3005” error that occurs when attempting to unpack a Canvas App. Indeed, this error occurs when validating the *.msapp source file of some CanvasApps.

Below is the output of the command when I tried to unpack my “mySuperCanvasApp.msapp”:

The tool returns the validation error: Connection ‘UsersList_1’ does not have a corresponding data source. In my case, this connection corresponds to a data source that I had abandoned and deleted afterwards. It looks like this connection was kept internally.

I managed to work around this problem and unpack my *.msapp file by following these steps:

• Rename the file mySuperCanvasApp.msapp by mySuperCanvasApp.zip. This will change the file extension.

• Extract ONLY the Properties.json file and open it using your preferred code editor.
• Then search on this file for the connection which is causing the issue and delete it!

• Add the modified “Properties.json” file to the zip file.

• Rename the zip file “mySuperCanvasApp.zip” to “mySuperCanvasApp.msapp” and create a new directory “MySuperCanvasApp_Src”.

Finally, run the following command to unpack the canvas app code to the mySuperCanvasApp_Src directory:

pac canvas unpack --msapp mySuperCanvasApp.msapp --sources MySuperCanvasApp_Src 

Hope it helps …