Jay Mobile beta had been working ok but just now I went to navigate via the overview panel and an error toast popped up (I didn’t tap Report because at the time it didn’t look like anything significant happened). After dismissing the error toast, all panes were gone except I was left with one pane titled Outline that was blank. Killing the app and running again created another pane titled Outline (leaving 2 such panes). My document did become visible. again.
New sync system
Jorge So not only on mobile app, but also in my other laptop I signed into the beta browser app and found that the document I had imported and renamed was not showing in the overview panel as encrypted in order to open it. I signed out and back in a few times and each time I saw that the name of the document was somehow evolving through the names I used until the last time I did it finally came up as the correct final document name.
So definetely something is up in the document management versioning in the beta.
I just released an update which should fix the problem where adding documents did not load them correctly on remote devices. If you sign out of those and back in, the missing documents should appear and added documents will load correctly in the future. @andrew @Jorge
Please let me know if that seems to be working better?
I use 2 laptops, one with the windows legend app 2.1 running beta. The second laptop ran with an older version the legend app, so I updated that last weekend to 2.1 as well and started up legend in beta. To my surprise new boards were created on my second laptop, all named ‘Board’ and no panes on it. Also the new boards I created on the my first laptop did not become visible. Aaargh. Now I’m working on my first laptop again, some (not all!) of the new boards that were created by my second laptop appeared and one board was missing I previously had on my first laptop! Aaargh. Had to recreate some boards on my first laptop again. Kinda frustrating. And to keep in mind when moving the new sync system from beta to stable I guess. As of now, I would expect a lot of ’service call’s from customers running stable when this new sync system moves to stable.
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My Mobile board disappeared from my Beta in browser. I had forgotten that I was running stable in my mobile, so I flipped the switch in my mobile to move to Beta and right there the Mobile board was recreated in the browser beta app. However, the board definitions I had were lost and the mobile board was reset to what I guess is the default of 3 panes: agenda, email and outline.
Ihadn’t tried the email pane in mobile. It’s handy that you can now move items from the email pane to the outline in the mobile, however opening email items in the mobile app is horribly slow, so I won’t be using it for now.
When I start-stop Legendapp on windows using beta a lot, 10 times in 1 minute or so, the boards get messed up. Between start and stop I do some minor changes to the document, adding an item, deleting an item.
@Jay Just noticed that if I set a pane to display deleted items, nothing is coming up. AT first I thought that it was because I had just restored my main work document from a backup and therefore nothing had been deleted, but then I opened my other documents and my old-corrupted document and all of them are showing a blank deleted items view. Only my personal document showed 2 deleted items, but I am 100% sure that this document has a ton of deleted items, and they are not displaying at all.
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I had 4 panes in my Android mobile app (beta). Then upon starting the app, a new outline pane appeared as the first pane. Going back into the mobile app a little later the same day resulted in all panes except the new outline pane disappearing.
On desktop beta, it shows the new outline pane first followed by the 4 original panes still on the Mobile board.
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@Jay I am freaking out!
Today in my root level for my personal document a number of items just appeared hanging in there along with all my usual branches. When I started exploring them I discovered that they are a number of entries I had from some interview questionnaires I had lost in 20/Nov/2020. I know because I specifically created an item to track that problem.
I don’t know if it’s all of the entries that reappeared now, but it’s quite a lot. At the time I had thought I had inadvertently moved them to a particular interview I had instead of copying them (which is what I am supposed to do), so I didn’t gave it more thought and decided to restore that template later.
But now that I am finding all those entries at my root level out of the blue I am again seriously concerned on data integrity. This continues to be a problem!!!!! Legend is unreliable if we cannot rely on it to safely keep everything we dump into it!!
I went ahead and looked into other documents and low and behold…in my sandbox document I found a number of items at the root level that belong in my personal document. I looked for those in my personal document and they are not there, so this is a problem that has been replicated several times in my environments.
I fear that the solution you implemented before with your “moved” items could be the cause for all these items appearing at the root level of other documents?
So far (that I know) these are the major items I have lost:
- My whole Inbox (you helped me recover it because it wasn’t displaying, so it was not really deleted from the dB)
- My interview questionnaire (I described above, that suddenly just reappeared today)
- One of my major projects (which I haven’t restored yet, because thank God the project is in pause)
- My issues branch (which had actually disappeared and was only able to restore it from a backup from Apr 20).
This is one too many lost branches, and I am increasingly worries how many more things I haven’t’discovered.
We have to get to the bottom of this data integrity problem.
From the time I was dwelving thruough the backups to find my Issues branch, I had observed (I believed I noted it in the thread) that I could tell from the backups that the main issues branch had disappeared, and for some reason many of it’s children had been promoted to the main root level. That was the behavior that led me to dropping my whole work document and restoring it from backup. What I am seeing now happening in my personal document is the same thing (but obviously on a different branch).
Edit:
To add more information I think this appearance of all those items might have coincided with me opening my old corrupted work document, because yesterday those items were not there, and today I opened that old document to confirm some information had been restored properly.
7 days later
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Now my phone beta app and my browser beta app have fallen out of sync. I had a number of items that I had moved a couple days ago from my Inbox branch to the proper places in the outline. My browser beta shows my Inbox properly almost empty, but my mobile app is still showing many (not all) of the items I had moved in the Inbox.
Then I checked and my mobile sync status said it hadn’t synced since today 1:45 pm (it’s10:22 pm). So that explains it, it just stopped syncing some of the items. And the last item I created in my mobile app that made it to the browser app? it was created at 1:45 pm.
It’s a pity there is no button to force the syncrhonization (not that it would be the solution, it’s just a workaround).
So I proceeded to kill the mobile app from memory, When I started it back up the Inbox now came up properly synchornized to what my brwoser beta Inbox. However, the sync status continues showing “Monday 1:45 pm”.
So something is causing the mobile app to stop synching, and something is not updating the sync status in the mobile app.
Also if I am focused on a specific branch and I restart the mobile app that branch will be immediately refreshed (resynched) as soon as the app comes up. But the other branches that have changes are not being resynched. When the sync status gets frozen in the overview pulldown, then only what is being displayed onscreen is synched when the app is rebooted.
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Editing on the browser beta app is becoming a little slow. Pressing Enter after a new item takes about 4 seconds for the app to create the new line below and mov the cursor to it. Not sure if it is the sync system that is causing that, but it is the likeliest place in my limited opinion so thats why I am posting this here.
This is not critical but highly annoying. Not sure if anybody else is seeing this, or is just the size of my documents that are causing this.
Edit:
Just observed that the delay in reaction is directly proportional to the number of items edited. I grabbed like 30 items that I needed to indent into a parent, and after pressing Tab (to indent them) it took > 40 seconds to process that, time through which the application was unresponsive.
Jay, is it possible to get an estimate of when the sync issues will be resolved, although I imagine it’s hard to gauge precisely.
In fact, it’s hard to put yourself in your shoes, but a few explanations so that you can put yourself in our shoes.
It’s been more than 3 months since the new synchronization system was launched in beta version. But we’ve been talking about it for over a year.
I can understand that most of the attention is on this new beta version, but the stable version is completely forgotten in history (so much so that for me it’s more a beta version than a stable one).
I can give examples of requests that date back several months, which in my opinion would have been easy to solve in the stable version (example here https://forum.legendapp.com/d/566-use-of-the-filter but there are dozens of others).
What worries me is that we see fairly minor beta updates every 10 or 15 days, I assume that you are traveling because there is no response either on the forum.
In the end, I have the impression that the beta version will become stable in a very long time, and therefore that the little minor bugs that really bother us on a daily basis will be resolved in several months, even several years.
Honestly, it’s very hard to accept.
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christophe I have been having thoughts along the same line, but you beat me to it.
For me its super important to be able to move this beta into stable as soon as it is safe (I use mailbird a lot).
I have been solely using the beta in browser now for almost 2 weeks, and I am working the nerve of upgrading my desktop app to beta (perhaps this weekend will be the day).
I too have noticed that @Jay must be either busy with some of the bugs that we have been reporting, or distracted on something else, however I think we need to help by establishing what the correct criteria should be for greenlighting the deployment of this beta to the stable community. This forum is great for communicating but not good at helping prioritize the many things that come up, and it is up to Jay to comb through the whole thing and try to figure out which are the items that have the most impact to the community.
I propose each of the ones that have been testing the beta and reported bugs could self prioritize your own bugs and publish in a single post a list (only one liner description and a link to your original report) of your bugs grouped by priority… stating:
A - Critical bugs (things that unless fixed should prevent the beta from being released to the stable platform, because they prevent core operation of the software and have no workarounds, so therefore would disrupt peoples lives if released)
B- High Priority bugs (things that have high impact in the usage of the application, but have a workaround that could allow the use of the software if they were to be released, but nevertheless using the workaround is disruptive or a huge time waster)
C- Medium Priority bugs (things that impact the usage, annoy us, but have a simple workaround that doesnt make us waste too much time and we can honestly be patient enough to wait for a few releases to get them fixed)
D- Low Priority bugs (Mostly display formatting bugs that have no impact in functionality, although annoying or bothersome are things we all can live with).
And lets stick to bugs… no feature requests in those lists.
This could help @Jay focus on the A class bugs, get them fixed and have the agreed support of the beta community to release to stable community, with the agreement that class B bugs would be the next thing he would work on after the release to stable.
Thoughts? Ill be working through my list and try to post it as soon as I have it this weekend
I’m very sorry for the lack of updates! I’ve been super busy and scattered for the past few weeks with moving countries, traveling, and a conference.
I’ve been doing a lot of the work on the sync system as an isolated project which I open-sourced, which has the benefit of many other developers (about 1200 now) finding and fixing bugs. I released that to 1.0 last week just in time for the conference (https://github.com/LegendApp/legend-state). So work has been progressing on improving sync, but isolated in that project with automated tests.
It seems like the core of the new sync system is fairly stable at this point, and remaining bugs are related to repairing old bugs from years ago (like @Jorge’s moved items). I’m trying to figure those out but they’re unfortunately very hard to reproduce. And the mobile sync issue seems like it might be in Firebase itself losing connection when the app goes into the background. That’s also unfortunately very hard to reproduce but I’m trying to figure it out…
I’m hoping to get sync super stable within the next couple of weeks and get it ready for full release.
Jorge The deleted view in beta is not 100% correct yet - I haven’t finished updating the logic there for the new sync system. It’s on my list to do before stable release.
christophe I can definitely see how you’d worry about that! But I think we will be able to get the new sync system released in a few weeks, and then we should be able to release bug fixes and minor features more quickly afterwards, because the overall infrastructure is in a much better place than before.
Jorge This is a great idea. It is quite overwhelming to triage all of the bugs and requests to figure out what is the most important. Knowing which of the issues are most critical would be very helpful 
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9 days later
I’ve got an update that should fix a lot of remaining issues that I’m just finishing testing tonight and will release tomorrow.
Some sync issues are unfortunately really hard to reproduce because they happen only in a specific set of circumstances. Or there’s some that appear to be sync problems but are actually due to crashes elsewhere…
I think I’ve reproduced and fixed everything reported here, and all the errors I’ve seen in the error reporter. So I’m optimistic about the next update 
. It’s a lot of changes so I’m playing it extra careful and doing a lot of testing before releasing the update.