All: Support for note history (WIP) #1415
Conversation
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This looks like a great addition to Joplin, but I have a few questions: How does the architecture look like? How many revisions are stored? Is the number of revisions configurable? I don't want that every single change (every key stroke) creates a new revision. When exactly is a revision created? |
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Can't wait for this. I've been using Simplenote for years. It is rudimentary and buggy, and scales poorly; but the note history is its absolute killer feature. Once Joplin gets history implemented, I'll be switching everything over. |
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Yes, quite keen to get this completed, and there's not too much left to be done. @tessus, by default it will keep revisions for 6 months (configurable), and the feature can be disabled. It's designed to be efficient in terms of storage space as it only keeps diff of changes. It will save revisions every 10 minutes. |
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@laurent22 Thanks for the info. Will the revisions also be synced or will they only exist in the local database? |
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They will be synced too. |
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Also, what happens, if you uncheck |
Auto-creating revisions for potentially thousands of notes would be too heavy, but there's a mechanism to auto-create one when a note is changed, and that note existed before the revision service. Was that note definitely an old one? |
They are kept, but no new revision is created.
They'll still be deleted after the number of days specified. So I guess if you set it to delete after 1 day, they'll be all gone after 24h. |
Hmm, but it seems that only the note after the change was captured, not the one before. Otherwise I would have a revision that only shows
Ok, I see.
Ok, makes sense. What would happen, if you set the value to 0? You can't use the up and down to set it to 0, but you can enter 0 manually. P.S.: Sorry for all these questions, but I guess the SRE in me is showing. |
Was the note recently modified? Because I think it's related to a glitch that I've just noticed. Basically the service will save a revision with the original content of a note, when that note existed before the service. To do that it relies on a property (basically item_changes.before_change_item) in the database that keep the previous content of a note. The problem is that this property item_changes.before_change_item has only been added at the same time as the revision service. So if a note was modified shortly before the revision service was installed, there would be an "item_changes" row for this change. The service will process this and create a revision but since the previous content was not saved in "before_change_item", it will just save a revision with the current content. This should only happen in that particular case. Any old note that gets modified from then on should get its original content saved as expected. I'm going to double check though. |
It means keep revisions for 0 days so everything will be deleted. Might have to fix this. |
I pulled the latest changes and used the |
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This is working as expected: there are two cases:
The reason for that is that we save revisions every 10 minutes, but if you make many changes within a few minutes and then stop modifying the note, the final revision will not contain the current content of the note. Basically at one point the service will see there's a revision from less than 10 minutes, and will not save a new one. That's why when you change the note again more than 7 days later, we save that revision that wasn't saved now. The logic is a bit complicated but the goal is to preserve the last significant state of a note. I consider that if you make many changes to a note then stop editing it for several months, the last significant state was at the end of that series of edits, so we need to save that. Sorry for the long post, and I guess I should also add this info somewhere while it's still fresh in my mind! |
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Thank you for this great feature! I noticed Android App updated and Win Desktop. However, IOS App not updated to support this feature so I receive a sync error "unknown type 13. When will the IOS App get the update? Thank you. |
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Ah, found the code as well, this means this is probably also related to #1517 as the ios app is not yet approved by apple probably (?) |
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@schemen, you are correct in your assumption. @laurent22 wrote this over at discourse, 15 hrs ago: “The iOS version has been submitted and should be available tomorrow once it’s been reviewed by Apple.” |
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Because of this I haven’t been able to use Joplin on IOS all day - not a very good advert. We definitely need to remember NOT to update desktop version until mobile updates are also available. |
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Yes that's not good. With the desktop, Android and terminal apps, I can do instant releases and fix issues. With iOS, we need to wait a long time till they review and even then it's not sure they'll approve. Next time there's a sync change like this, I'll add a warning. |
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Random comment: the code here makes references to a 'revision viewer GUI', i don't see any way to bring this up, is that enabled yet? |
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@Dasymi Apple is really bad with validating updates to applications in their AppStore. It takes them forever to do anything. And this new notarizing madness makes it even more complicated on macOS. This is why I dislike this freaking AppStore monopoly so much. They decide what is allowed on your systems. |
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@mgrandi click the info toolbar button and then on |
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@laurent22 maybe a bit off-topic, but I was wondering, if there wasn't a way to make it work across 2 database versions. I'm just thinking about the technical options here, but let's say you have a new statement that includes new columns. but the old statement with the old database structure are still valid, so I'm not sure why the old version wouldn't work. When it comes to syncing, just sync unknown types and the old version is going to ignore them anyway. So I'm a bit puzzled why using 2 different versions wouldn't work. I'm just curious for an answer, I'm not saying that Joplin must support sync across different database versions. (I just don't understand what the problem is.) |
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How do I access the note history using android app? Thank you. |
It's mostly for safety: if sync encounters an item it doesn't know, it just stops there to avoid any data corruption. I'm not currently testing how the sync process and db would handle unknown items, and it's not really worth it since it's potentially a lot of additional complexity, just for rare one-off events like this one. |
The mobile app also creates note revisions, however the tool to inspect them is only available on desktop at the moment. Note that all apps (mobile, desktop, etc.) share the same history so if you notice some issue on mobile, you can simply inspect the history on desktop. Since it's a bit of an advanced tool, it's possible it will be only available on desktop. |
Thanks for the info.
In that case we should probably restrict the setting to the desktop app. |
Revisions are still being saved on mobile, and these settings are useful to define how they should be saved. |
Ok, but I thought that revisions are synced. So what will happen, if you set the desktop to keep 10 days and the Android to keep 5 days? This probably means that after 5 days older revisions will be deleted and no longer available on desktop. |
That's a good point, it's a setting that's kind of global to all the apps, but there's no such concept in Joplin. I'm not sure what would be a good workaround - I think for now I'll just add a description below "Warning: this setting applies to all the application" or something like this. |
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That's why I thought limiting the setting to the desktop app (since it is the only one that read the history snapshots) would make sense. On the mobile apps we could add the message that the day count can only be set on the desktop app, or omit all history settings. It was just a thought, it doesn't mean that it was a good one. :-) |
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@laurent22 one more question that came to mind: what will happen, if note history is enabled on one client, but disabled on another? |
The notes revisions will not be created on the client when it's disabled, but everything else will be the same. |
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@laurent22 so I will still have a note history on the machine where it is enabled (and no history where it is disabled)? in this case only the days-to-keep is a "global" one. ok, just had to be sure. |
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@laurent22 Is there already a possibility to view the revision history or the actual differences in the command line version of Joplin? |
This branch is to more easily manage this big feature, which is rather complicated (though I thought it would be easier).
The goals are: