Update 1676597211079 updated to the New Sync System.

You should not even notice a difference, except that you’ll see a “Loading documents…” message on the first load while it updates the local cache.

This new system is more consistent, using one state/sync method for everything: documents, boards, settings, and even UI state. We built it in partnership with the Bravely team, and it’s already used in their web and mobile apps. The sync system is a plugin for our open source Legend-State library, which we will also open source later this month. That way other developers can use it, which hopefully will help the community as well as help find bugs and improve Legend.

The main new feature is just that it will work better. But also:

  • Offline <-> Offline sync is more correct and consistent. There were some tough-to-solve edge cases (creating documents offline, moving between documents, sync failures with massive documents) that are fully fixed in this new system.
  • The desktop app syncs to files (see the path in the Desktop section of settings). So now you can back up Legend’s files yourself.
  • Boards also sync to files. We don’t have a way to restore Board backups just yet, but we can now explore that.
  • This reduced a ton of code and complexity in Legend’s core, so it will be much easier to iterate new features/fixes quickly.

Please let me know how it works for you. Are you hitting any bugs? Is it faster or slower than it was before?

    Jay stickied the discussion .

    Jay I was excited to see this come finally live. Although I have to move very carefuly now because of all the previou sproblems I’ve had.
    with
    Currently a number of things I entered into the Windows Desktop app didn’t make it into the online version (even though the status ays online). So now I cannot even trust the Online status that Legend shows to be sure that stuff has synced properly in the stable version. The changes are just not showing up in the stable browser version, so i need to figure what has been lost.

    I gave it a quick try by opening a browser version in incognito mode and opening the beta version you published. And now my whole first level entry in My Tasks document is gone. That was my Inbox!!!!! If I look at the windows desktop stable and the stable browser version they still hsow my Inbox there. But the beta version just blew up my INbox!!!!!

    Thios is not good right now I feel I cannot trust Legend with data… Now all versions have issues for me.

      It’s not possible for it to delete any data, only for it to not sync it properly. So your existing data won’t have any issues. And we do extensive backups so it can’t be fully lost.

      I think it might be that maybe the Inbox got out of order, and it’s showing it farther down the document? Or the boards in beta/stable are different and don’t sync with each other now, so maybe the filters in the pane in beta is hiding the Inbox how?

      You mentioned the items you entered in the desktop version not syncing - was that on stable or was that in the new beta?

      I’ll test some more and see if I can reproduce item ordering problems like that.

        Jay So i had 3 instances open
        1) Windows desktop app in stable
        2) Browser version in stable
        3) Browser version in beta (open in incognito mode)

        What I added in the windows desktop never made it to either browser version
        What I added inteh (2) browser stable did make it back to the desktop

        Jay I think it might be that maybe the Inbox got out of order, and it’s showing it farther down the document?

        Nope . I filtered and searched for it, and it is nowhere to be found in the Beta browser.

        Jay Or the boards in beta/stable are different and don’t sync with each other now, so maybe the filters in the pane in beta is hiding the Inbox how

        I created a new board with onl yone pane pointing to the top level of thedocument and searched and filtered for it … still no Inbox shows up in the beta browser. I even logged out and back in in the beta browser, with the same result. My first entry branch is nowhere to be found.

              Can you check the Deleted view and see if Inbox is in there? I found an edge case in the stable version where it was sometimes not handling undoing deletion correctly, and also sometimes continuing to show items even if they were deleted. So I believe that is one reason some instances were showing items where others didn’t, so stable versions might be showing items even if they’re actually deleted. Beta now handles it correctly, so it may be appearing under deleted items?

              I’ve been hitting it hard with three instances myself and in the cases where items are missing in one it seems to always be that the others consider it deleted. So hopefully this corrected handling of deleted items should fix a lot of the sync bugs.

              Oh, and one thing you might notice when comparing them - beta has longer sync delays on purpose to improve performance, so don’t worry about that 🙂

                Jay
                Also the windows desktop in stable asked me that there was an upgrade available. i installled it (it is now 2.0.9), and after that the entries that are images are no longer displaying the images n the desklop. Howevr, the browsr version in stable does continue to display the images correctly embedded n teh outline.

                After installing it the synchronization to the brwoser stable version is now working both ways, but now I LOST ALL MY RECENT CHANGES THAT HAD BEEN DONE IN THE DESKTOP!!

                I’ll have to re do them (luckily I had been careful enough to produce all exports from the desktop), so i don’t have to do it from memory, but this has become unacceptably unreliable. I am wasting so much time just trying to cope with this.

                • Jay replied to this.

                    Jorge I’m so sorry about that 🙁. This beta update should fix everything, and changes should never again be lost like that. The stable version has a bug (that I’ve only ever seen on your account) where it just stops syncing at all because your documents are so big that boards fail to sync. That should be 100% fixed in the beta version.

                    I’d suggest checking the beta version to see if anything is missing (and restore from Deleted if it’s in there), and then use it instead of stable. And if you want to be extra sure that it’s syncing you could run it side by side with a different instance (like both browser and app) to make sure your changes are syncing through. This should hopefully fix all sync problems for good so that you don’t have to worry about reliability anymore.

                        Jay

                        Jay Can you check the Deleted view and see if Inbox is in there?

                        Checked in the beta version and not there

                        Jay I’d suggest checking the beta version

                        Yes, that’s actually what I was doing when I first read the new beta was out, but unless we can figure out where my Inbox went I can’t really use it. And I am more than willing to switch back to the beta. the stable version is a pain in the butt for me (white screens of death, it goes offline constantly, etc..) But Data Consistency is prime for now.

                              Hmm, can you tell me the name of the document that Inbox is in? I could look through the backend data and see if anything in there looks wrong.

                              It should be installing/backup up into the roaming folder. Is there nothing there?

                                Jay I replied via IM.

                                Yes the roaming folder is there and it is now backng up into that folder,but the previous files were wiped out with the install. But never mind that, I have had no need for those backups and the new backups are generating correctly so let’s concentrate on what is wrong in the beta version

                                  I’m still getting random boards appearing when I use the Windows desktop. It doesn’t happen when I use just the web app, but the “ghost boards” (I’ve started calling them) pop up on both platforms when I open the Windows app.

                                  From what I can tell, these ghost boards appear randomly, inserted between real boards/folders. They cannot be deleted until you change the name (I rename them ghostboard1, ghostboard2, etc). The name change made on either platform reflects on the other. Deleting them after the name change then reflects on the other platform. But if I refresh/restart the desktop app, 2-3 ghost boards reappear and then show up on the web app when I refresh that.

                                  I have not lost any existing boards/folders, but I had one instance of when an existing folder with several boards was renamed “Board” on the Windows app and would not open. Fortunately, it was still named correctly and worked properly on the web app. As far as I can tell, I have not lost any data within my lists.

                                  One other thing I have noted, my Documents now seem to be sorted in alphabetical order and I cannot put them back into the order I used to have. This started with the new sync update.

                                  For now, I am sticking with the web app because it seems to be stable. Also, all of this applies to the beta version. I have not tried switching to stable (just in case things start to disappear).

                                    I have the beta running in a private window browser to keep it completely separate from my stable instances. Today int he morning it went OFFLINE while the stable versions (both desktop and browser) remained online. This is experiencing the previous problem I was hoping that this version would fix as well.

                                    I refreshed the browser window and now it has been stuck in “Loading documents….”

                                    webalstrom Be careful… that’s the exact type of behavior I started seeing before I lost my boards, and many of those ghost boards were really mapped into real boards in other instances…wiping them out could be eliminating your real boards and at some point in the future you’ll notice you lost them.

                                        @Jay y BTW I have refreshed the Beta instance a couple of times and it’s been in “Loading documents…” message for about 30 minutes now

                                        Update…..got tired of waiting so completely obliterated my private browser window and relaunched the browser which effectively caused a completel reset and prompted me to relogin which seems to be working now. The refresh with the existing instance doesn’t seem to have any effect. Because I am running it in a private window, closing it completely obliterates whatever persistent data it was keeping in cache, so it seems soemthing in the persistent data is causing it to loop into that “Loading documents….” state.

                                        • Jay replied to this.

                                          Jorge Thanks for the heads up. I did notice one of the ghost boards was one of my real boards that had lost it’s name. The other boards (which I have deleted) are all blank and have the “Create a new board” screen. But it does make me nervous to do anything in Legend.

                                          I also found out a little bit ago that I lost some data. I had copied and pasted some stuff yesterday, move it around within the parent node and collapsed it. I know I entered this info because I found it in my copy and paste history. Fortunately, it wasn’t anything significant, but it makes me nervous about what else I might lose without even knowing it.

                                            I think the boards issue is some weird conflict created when using both stable and beta, which I didn’t test enough. Stable and beta use the same board object in the database, but with different property names, so there’s some weirdness when syncing both.

                                            I’m just getting on a long flight but I will fix these issues ASAP when I arrive.

                                            I have the boards problem fixed, just testing it some more and trying to track down Jorge’s other issues before I release it. The problem was that updates from the stable version used the old property names, so the beta version thought there was no name at all, so it defaulted to “Board”.

                                            webalstrom One of the changes in beta (which I forgot I’d made) is that I was trying to make Document grouping/sorting more intuitive. The ordering method had previously been a bit broken by default (it was basically sorting them randomly and might change when signing out/back in) and only really worked correctly if you manually sorted them. So I thought just alphabetizing documents would be better and clearer?

                                            But do you think it’s better to sort them manually? I can bring back the previous behavior and try to make the default sorting work better.

                                                  I just released an update which should fix the board sync issues and hopefully will fix the loading errors @Jorge saw.

                                                  Running the beta in a private window is a good idea. I think if we see any more errors they are likely going to be in the local cache, so then you can easily obliterate it.

                                                  @Jorge Can you please try this latest version in a private window and let me know if you see it go offline or get stuck on Loading Documents… again? If it does, could you send me a screenshot of the Console in the browser developer tools?

                                                  I am keeping two instances of the beta and one of stable open for a while, hoping if any of these bugs still exist I can get them to happen to me 🙂

                                                  Btw, the “Loading documents” message should not take any longer than usual to load. That message just replaces the previous empty white (or dark) screen while loading from the local cache. If it’s taking unusually long it’s probably stuck. I will have an improvement to load time coming soon though! I have a new approach to caching the text parsing results so it doesn’t have to parse all of the text on every load that I made while offline on the plan. It’s working well but needs more testing. And I just want to stabilize the current beta changes before I throw another big change in there…

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