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Autosave function

Hi all!

We have been avid users of RoyalsTS since a long time. The feature mostly missed and the one I have nagged a bit about before is a Autosave feature so you can choose if you want RoyalTS to do a save every X timeslice.

So may times someone has forgotten to save after having added and done changes just to have a PC crash, RoyalTS crash, och similar...

This is highly annoying and as it is, I might start looking at the competition, I really like RoyalTS, but this is highly annoying and I feel it should not be that a difficult function to implement...

Please look to add this, if RoyalTS did and optional autosave every 15 mins so whatever would be super!

Merry christmas and happy new years!

/Dave


1 person likes this idea

Thanks for the valuable feedback. I will see how we can improve some things.


As for the toast notifications you have two options:

1. disable toast notifications originating from Royal TS in the OS Settings

2. go to View -> Options -> Notifications and disable all or specific notifications area


Regards,
Stefan

Hey Stefan, thank you for following up.


I'd agree that users who store their files on a network share might experience delays, especially if their files are large, and I'm sure that would get annoying.


However it's 2023 and it's rare to find an app which doesn't remember settings unless explicitly told to save. 


Recommendations:

1. New users storing their files locally should have the default for new folders set to save on change. Forcing new users to know to turn on this setting is counter intuitive.


2. The application should time how long it takes to complete a save, if the delay is significant, then notify the user that a saves are taking a long time, and tell the user that saves could be disabled using X settings.


3. Assuming users are making a lot of changes over a short period of time and saves are getting bogged down:

        3a. Have an option to suspend saves for the next X hours which would allow users to complete their bulk changes

        3b. User definable time during the day to automatically trigger a save, like over lunch.


Stretch: New changes made by the user are committed immediately to the UI, but the save happens in the background. In this way the user isn't waiting for a save to complete, and still gets to retain their changes. The UI could have an indicator showing that a save is inflight/completed.



Regarding the line "Royal TS has to announce each time it saves". Every time RoyalTS completes a save it triggers an OS level toast popup. This is distracting. 

Recommendation:

  1. a UI element showing "not saved", "save inflight", "save completed".
  2. An option to disable the toast popup, and only alert user to problems.

Hi Roy!


I'm really sorry you lost the data and I can understand your frustration.


The main reason "auto save" is not enabled by default is the fact that we need to save the document on the UI thread. Depending how large your document is and where you store your document (network share), this can take a bit and during this time, the UI is blocked. At one point we had that setting enabled by default if I remember correctly but we had to reverse it because too many users were complaining about the brief "lock ups". I guess this is something where we can't make everyone happy :(


Your last sentence is a bit confusing. What do you mean with "Royal TS has to announce each time it saves"?


Regards,
Stefan

Started using RoyalTS after using other similar products. I didn't realize that this product doesn't automatically save changes as they're made, and promptly lost all my changes when the organization forced a reboot. This is really annoying. 


Found this thread above which talks about turning on automatic saving. Ok. that's great but that option should be enabled by default. 


So I turned on the option to automatically save and now Royal TS has to announce each time it saves, This is doubly annoying:  like really app, you want a cookie for doing something that you should have been doing all along?


Hi Neil,


thanks for sharing your issue. Unfortunately this is "by design". If a user clicks on OK in the properties dialog, the object will be marked as "modified" - even if it hasn't been modified. This is because of the datastructure we use internally. Not sure if I should go into all the details but it's related to how Royal TS determines which properties should be written (we do not write values which are "default" values for efficiency). So there's a chance that even though the user didn't change the value, it might change the object because of a changed default value and there's no other way to ensure the new value will be written to disk. In this case, the user who clicked OK last will win in the merge scenario.


Regards,
Stefan

Just to add my piece to this thread, in the current version of RoyalTS, shared documents are working pretty well in my team.

However, we've discovered an issue around saving.

If PersonA in the team is modifying an object in a document (ie has the Properties window open for that object), and PersonB (unbeknownst to PersonA) is also modifying the same object from the same document, the following happens.  PersonA finishes, and exits the object Properties window.  Then PersonB also finishes modifying the object and closes the Properties window.  PersonA saves their document.  Sometime after, PersonB saves their document.  After clicking the merge button (that shows up in bottom right corner of RoyalTS, PersonA now takes a look at the object, and anything they did was overwritten by PersonB's modifications.  Even if PersonB didn't touch the particular field that PersonA was modifying.

Even with the option "Save Document after using the Properties dialog" ticked, it still doesn't address the different times in saving. 

Hi Darren,


unless you aren't using the free Shareware edition of Royal TS, you can create and load multiple documents at once. So you should be able to load your personal credential file next to your team document.


Regards,
Stefan

Thanks for your quick responses Stefan. We use a team document so I can not stored the credentials in the document. 


My use case is this:


I created a new credential in the application document. I forgot to save and my machine got rebooted. So I lost the user/password combination.


I realise that it is my own downful and I should have saved.

The application "document" is saved automatically when Royal TS is closed. If you want to have more control over that, I recommend to move the creds to a dedicated document.


Regards,
Stefan

Ah, that would explain it. I was trying to enable it on the Application itself. Is this possible? I store all of my credentials at the Application level.

Hi Darren,


in the Navigation panel, right-click on the document you want to enable this feature and open the properties. There you will find the setting on the first page. Make sure you are using the latest version of Royal TS.


Let me know if this helps.


Regards,
Stefan

Hi Stefan, I looked for this option but I can not seem to find it. Please can you provide with steps of how I turn it on?


Sorry if this is a basic question.


Kind Regards,


Darren Gipson

Hi Dave,


auto save on a time basis is hard to implement because of all the cross threading and concurrency issues. We did implement a feature in V4 which may do the same job:

"Save Document after using the Properties dialog"

See also:

https://content.royalapplications.com/Help/RoyalTS/V4/index.html?reference_document_main.htm


Let me know if this helps.


Regards,
Stefan


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