It’s hard for me to tell, but it seems like I might be losing snapshots when I merge documents. What is the expected behavior of snapshots when you merge documents?
The expected behaviour here is that all of the snapshots for all merged documents will be pulled together into a single list, after the merge. So if document A has two snapshots, and document B and C have one a piece, if all three are merged together you should have four snapshots total.
There is a problem here, but it is intermittent.
Recently after again being unable to find content I expected to be in the snapshot list, I happened to merge 2 documents with a short list of snapshots. It should have resulted in about 8 snapshots, but I found only four.
So I decided to repeat the proposed test. I got different results.
I merged two test documents with 1 snapshot each, 2 total. The merged document contained 1 snapshot.
I repeated the test (2 documents, 1 snapshot each, 2 total) and the merged document had 2 snapshots.
I’ve repeated the test numerous times, carefully counting snapshots, and can’t find a definite way to reproduce either behavior yet. However, with the snapshots list open, I noticed that if all the snapshots for both documents are listed, all the snapshots are saved to the merged document. If only one documents has its snapshot(s) listed, snapshot(s) will be lost if the documents are merged.
Since I merge and split documents with some frequency, I’m probably missing a not insignificant number of snapshots. Could it be an indexing issue, where they are lost to the snapshot list but not the actual scrivener project?
P.S. should I post this in the Bug Report section? (or perhaps the thread could be moved there, if appropriate)
I will move this to the bug report forum for you, since you seem to be experiencing something outside of expected behaviour.
I had a question on one of your remarks:
What do you mean by this, since the Snapshots list can only display Snapshots for one item a time. Even if you are in Scrivenings mode, only the list for the active document the cursor or selection is in will show its snapshot list.
My impression was that sometimes all the snapshots were listed when both documents were selected. However, that’s not something I checked carefully.
I repeated the merge tests this morning. Once, switching between documents in the binder brought back the missing snapshot. After that, neither document switching nor reopening the project file would restore the missing snapshot.
In the last test, I merged two documents with identifying snapshots (“This is the first document.”, “This is the second document.”, respectively). The snapshot for the second document remained.
This is happening in a very large Scrivener file (2.61 GB) that’s over 5 years old.
Okay, I think I see a display glitch related to the snapshot list when merging, however this doesn’t appear to be a data glitch, at least what I am seeing. Here is how I reproduced it:
- Created a new blank project.
- Renamed the untitled document to “A” and added “One” to its text area, then took a snapshot.
- Created a document titled “B” and added “Two” to its text, taking a snapshot.
- Selected both documents in the Binder and changed the view mode to Scrivenings (you won’t see the Snapshots pane otherwise, and this display bug only appears immediately after taking a snapshot). You should see the snapshot list for the first document, A, in all cases.
- Pressed Shift-Cmd-M to merge the documents.
- The snapshot list remains showing just the one snapshot for “A”.
However, if you click somewhere else and then come back, you’ll find both the snapshot for A and B in the list. So like I say, this is just a display glitch with the list not getting the message to update itself after a merge. I’m not sure if that is what you are seeing.