New sync system

Jorge

@Jay I’ll try to keep those top level items described in my previous entry without fixing for a short while in case you need item Id’s that might help you debug, but soon I’ll need to restore them manually to their original position.

Jorge

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.

Jay

Ok, the latest update fixes every bug I’ve seen in our error reporting system, and should fix most of the remaining bugs, like:

Jorge
andrew
Eik
Eik

I’ve been testing every scenario I can think of and trying to follow the steps you’ve posted to reproduce the bugs, and it seems like I’ve gotten everything. I’m going to focus now on searching for bugs in migration of stable to beta, and missing items issues.

Jorge

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.

christophe

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.

Jorge

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

Jay

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 🙂.

Jay

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.

Jay

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.

Eik

Sometimes I suspect the ‘state’ of a pane and its items seems to be wrong. When I restart Legend the items in the pane are then shown correctly. Normally I have the legend app open and running 24/7. I hibernate my laptop every end of the day. Coming out of hibernation it occurs that sometimes the ‘state’ is not correct anymore. Not a big issue, I now restart the legend app first thing in the morning! But I was wondering, is there a way I can ‘force’ refresh a pane or ‘force’ refresh all panes?

Jorge

Eik Try Alt to bring the wrapper menu up and then View > Reload
It will reload the whole app. The app sometimes doesnt respond to Alt pressed when the cursor is n any place of the screen so it makes it feel like an erratic behavior. Ive found that if you press Alt after having clicked in the Pane Name or in the Filter field, then the Alt key is responded correclty and the menu comes up.

Eik

Jorge Found it, thanks for the tip. Would be nice to have a small icon on the right upper corner next to sync status icon or ctrl-f5 or ctrl-r shortcut for this.

Jorge

@Jay I have started using the desktop app as of a week and a half ago, and I have noticed that every now and then a single board disappears, and only until I restart the app completely the board comes back into view. Just reloading (as I describe above to Eik) doesnt do it. It has to be afull restart of the app.
——
I take that back I have restarted the app a couple times today. The first time the board that was missing came back, but later in the day disappeared again along with another one. I restarted the application and now they didnt come back. However I can see them perfectly fine in the browser version of a different machine.
I tried to log out of the desktop app and it tells me

This means that even though the status is online and it says that it was synced 1 minute ago, there is some syncing problems still going on.

I decided to take the risk and losing whatever hadnot been synced (although it would be nice if there was a log or somewhere where you could see what has not been synced when this message popus up), and after logging out and back in, the boards are back.

Jorge

Jorge @Jay Update… it has now been several times that in the desktop app a board I was working on just disappears as the name, and a new ghost “Board” is created. I have consistently found that instead of messing with that ghost board, by just rebooting the desktop app a couple of times the board is properly brought back both in name and content.
REbooting only once doesnt do it. In many occassions it brings back the board name but not the board content completely. The second reboot brings back the full content of the board.

I dont know if it is just a matter of timing in the syncing, but my impatience leads me to just reboot a second time to get the problem solved.

Jorge

@Jay I am getting more stuff appearing in my personal document that comes from my work document!!
Many items have appeared out of the blue just below my first top level entry [ Inbox ] . A lot had appeared a couple of weeks ago, and today I got more items that clearly come from my work document.

Jorge

Changes in the browser version in a pane are not being brought back to the desktop app in a timely basis.
I opened a third pane in the desktop app. Because of the issue described above, I rebooted the desktop app but continued working on the browser app in another machine. Once I had finished doing everything I closed the third pane in the browser app, but that is never being updated in the desktop app. The desktop app shows 3 panes open in that board, while the browser app shows only 2 (because I had closed one).

Jorge

@Jay I am abandoning the use of the desktop app for now… this is the 5th time in the day that board disappears from the desktop app. Ithink I will stick to the browser version until this is fixed. now my [Process Inbox] boards have disappeared from both my Job and Personal groups of boards.

Jorge

@Jay I switched to my browser and my [Process Inbox] in my Job group is there, but not in my Personal group!!!
Not only that bu now the Mobile board disappeared from the browser version and can only be found in the desktop app!!!!

Also a board I had deleted in the desktop app is now back in the browser version!!!

Now I am getting REAL NERVOUS with board consistency!!!! Please help We cannot go back to the board instability we had before.

Jorge

@Jay I think this had been reported before, but in one of the most recent updates the filter and collapse functions just cease working after a while (both for the browser version and the mobile app). They start working again after recycling the application but end up not working again after a while.

Jay

Sorry for my absence this week! I just had a surgery to get my deviated septum fixed and recovery took a lot longer than expected! I am looking into these issues now.

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