Status bar to show sync / autosave status (feature request) #459
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For a quick summary around this issue I'd like to summarize what is and isn't possible surrounding a visual indicator. It's possible to indicate that we have local changes which we haven't yet pushed out to Simperium. It's possible to know that after a successful response from the server that our local changes have been accepted and if we have no further local changes since that confirmation we can turn off the indicator. It's impossible to know if we have "fully sync'ed" because the fundamental working model of Simperium (which powers Simplenote) is that the app is always in a constant process of synchronizing. We cannot know locally if there are new changes on the server on their way to our copy of the app. We also cannot know if the server successfully folds in our changes if we get no response. This means that we can know for sure if we haven't attempted to synchronize changes and we can know if our changes were accepted but we cannot know if our changes fail to synchronize and we cannot know for sure that they succeeded or failed unless we hear back from the server. That all being said we have been stewing on this issue and hope to have some solution worked out at some point, but probably not before 1.0.9 is done. Thanks for the feedback, many others have asked about a similar feature. |
But, if the server tells the client that there are no new changes available on the server, surely the client app can now report something like this: "Last sync attempt finished: Apr. 21, 9:15:34 AM" Am I correct? |
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Related: #544: "Please add a new 'File > Sync and Exit' menu command" |
@unforgettableid I'll try not to be too redundant here since I started answering in your other issue. Simplenote never "attempts a sync" per se. When it has local changes it pushes those out to the server. When the server receives updates it sends those updates out to the apps. Since a stateful socket between the server and apps is maintained whenever they are open these updates are unsolicited meaning that the app never asks the server for recent updates; the server simply sends them as they come. Since Simplenote is by nature a distributed application and updates to the same note could happen from different devices at near the same time we also run into race conditions with the updates, meaning that an announcement from the server could be on its way at the time we think we are up to date (meaning that we are now no longer up to date but don't realize it). Now, we can ask ourselves at any given point in time when we aren't receiving an update notice from the server: did we not receive an update notice because we are up to date with the information or did we fail to receive the network packets? |
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@roundhill adding some random notes here after digging in: I believe that we could hook into
many aspects of our local queueing are still mysterious to me but I think we could end up with lists of notes and even specific parts of notes that fall into these categories
some kind of network spinner could be a great implementation detail for visualizing the third kind in that list. having definitely-unsynchronized edits is a good reason to confirm before closing too. |
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This feature is still requested often, most recently in #1388662-zen |
co-authored by @belcherj and @codebykat with design work by @SylvesterWilmott ## Description We've been unable to resolve the worst sync bugs in the application and feature development has been artificially limited by the fact that we have to fight a number of data-flow issues tightly coupling different levels of the application's architecture together. In this branch, we're ripping apart the entire app state and Simperium data flow to rebuild it in order to remove a number of those couplings and races. This commit changes most of the app and was rolled out in staging to test the changes. We're also replacing `draft-js` with `Monaco` which is almost as big of a change conceptually as changing the state. Moving to `Monaco` allows us to remove a copy of the note data from the app and allows us to maintain a fully-synchronous update cycle, eliminating a race condition between the Simperium copy of the data, the app copy, and the contents in the text buffer. ## Major code changes - The interface between `node-simperium` and this app has been moved into Redux state and out of `indexedDB`. The `indexedDB` interface as asynchronous and led to sync issues under a variety of race conditions with the network data, remote updates, browser tab scheduling, whether the browser was focused or hidden behind other windows, and more. The new synchronous interface guarantees that updates occur when we expect them to occur and therefore will be updated by the time we continue processing changes and updates from the server. - `Monaco`'s synchronous plaintext interface allows us to extend the atomic "all updates occur together and instantaneously" paradigm to the text buffer. By sharing the note data in the text editor, in the app, and in `node-simperium`, we will guarantee that we won't accidentally apply new edits to old data. - In many cases we have been dispatching multiple actions in order to perform one real action. For example, edit a note and then clear out the search state. Because these presented intermediate states for the app, partial updates, they have been removed. Now we have created new Redux actions for these real actions and app state has been adjusted so that each kind of data has its own reducer and those reducers listen to all the actions which could affect them. Now we will see a single dispatch that multiple reducers listen to instead of dispatching one action type for each reducer. - The Simperium connection has been moved into a new centralized middleware. All Simperium interactions take place in this middleware and are no longer woven into the app. This allows the app to update so that there's only ever one copy of a note's data and it's always up to date with the text editor. This resolves longstanding issues with the note list showing expired data. It also allows us to model the Simperium connection as a reactive system that responds to changes in the app and injects new events from the server in a way that's independent from local operation. This has dramatically simplified many different subsystems. - The persistence layer has now been created as a separate subsystem from before, when it was integrated with the Simperium code. It now operates as a kind of background worker that persists the Redux state into `indexedDB` and stores the entire contents atomically. Previously, integrated into the note bucket, the persistence layer would update each note, ghost, and bucket value separately leading to mismatches between a note and the base version it was built from, leading to sync issues. - So-called "prop drilling" has been replaced by connecting components in the React tree to state. This was done to simplify the interfaces around the app. It was previously difficult to understand what exactly was executing with the `onAction` props because there wasn't a clear way to walk up the component tree in an editor without resorting to text searching. Any `onEdit` type actions have been replaced with `dispatchProps` that directly dispatch the intended actions. ## Related or fixed issues ### Defects Resolves #2171 (note display doesn't update height immediately upon change from menu bar) Resolves #2074 (floating IME on Korean input) Resolves #2014 (when opened note changes so it's not in the search, it still stays open) Resolves #1953 (when renaming tag, update in search bar if tag opened) Resolves #1942 (can't easily select start of note content) Resolves #1887 (renaming a tag removes it from a note) #### Cursor position and movement Resolves #2085 (cursor jumps to new note) Resolves #2035 (cursor hidden at bottom of note) Resolves #1595 (restore cursor position when flipping between edit/preview mode) Resolves #1477 (cursor jumping in Windows) #### Synchronization Resolves #1938 (not restoring tags when reverting to an earlier revision) Resolves #1641 (updates to a tag in one session don't update in other sessions until they reload) Resolves #1640 (infinite duplication of tag name when editing tag) Resolves #1562 (content not syncing) Resolves #1520 (only syncing one note at a time/per session) Resolves #1291 (quirky unsynced changes info) Resolves #502 (data loss when editing simultaneous with iOS) Resolves #459 (show note sync indicator) #### Force-sync #1897 #800 #### Ghost-Writing Resolves #2030 Resolves #1787 ### Enhancements Resolves #2162 (mostly - additional syncing metadata for notes) Resolves #1836 (remove `app-state`) Resolves #1816 (confusing revision history ordering) #1537 (add indicator to show syncing status) Resolves #2036 (logging-out in one sessions logs out all sessions) Resolves #1410 (logout is buried in app settings and hard to find) #### Private Mode #1924 - functionality in Firefox private mode other than offline persistence ### Performance Resolves #2172 (slow app) Resolves #501 (slow loading large notes) ### Deprecations Resolves #2117 (audit use of draftJS) Resolves #1762 (decorator performance in draftJS) Resolves #1026 (use of `token` in `localStorage` in `boot.js`) ### Possibly - check these #1698 (problems with Korean input and lists at start of note) #1619 (buggy Japanese IME conversion) #1572 (RTL languages - checked tasks moving to the right) #1511 (missing characters on Korean IME conversion) #1456 (slow, possibly 4K-resolution-related)
It will be helpful if we have a status bar or a message that shows if a note has been successfully synced or saved in a system.
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