Prevent Losing Your Changes Due to Change Notifications
I’ve encountered this issue a few times, and it’s incredibly frustrating to lose the work I’ve done. Once I figured out what was causing it, I thought I’d share it here in the community—hopefully, it helps someone else avoid the same problem. There may also be other ways this notification can be triggered, so understanding how it happens can help prevent it.
Here’s what I found triggers the notifications:
- You and a teammate are working on the same flow step simultaneously.
- Or, you open a flow step, start the debugger (in view debug logs), and then make changes without closing the flow step first. When you try to save, you get hit with a change notification asking you to refresh, and—boom—you lose all your data.
To avoid this:
- Communicate with your team if you’re working on the same flow step to prevent overlapping changes.
- Save your work before starting the debugger or close the flow step after starting the debugger and before making any further changes and reopen and do your changes.
These simple steps can help you keep your hard work intact!
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Comments
Nuri Ensing thanks for sharing! We are taking up the debug issue as a bug. As for working together, we could make some future improvements to prevent this, but I'm curious to get your thoughts. Would you want the resource to be locked out? Or see that someone else is on the resource like Google Docs does? Or something else?
Thank you for sharing this Nuri Ensing.
For what it's worth, I had also received this error in the past when I had two tabs open with the same flow step.
Tyler Lamparter I would say that it would probably be ideal (and simplest) to simply move the alert to before the edits occur (e.g., "This step has pending changes from another user. Are you sure you want to continue?").
Hi Tyler Lamparter!
Apologies for the delayed response, and thank you for involving us in the thought process—it's one of the things that really sets Celigo apart as both a platform and a community.
Here are a few ideas I had regarding this issue:
1. Real-time Collaborative Editing (Complex):
It would be great to support real-time collaborative editing, allowing multiple team members to work on the same flow or codebase simultaneously. Similar to how tools like Google Docs or VS Code Live Share work (check Visual Studio Live Share: Real-Time Code Collaboration Tool (microsoft.com)), each user could see the other collaborators' cursors and edits in real-time. Additionally, displaying the editor's name next to the line they are working on would help track changes easily and improve coordination. This could be an advanced feature but one that offers a significant boost in productivity, especially for teams working on complex integrations.
2. Locking and Notifications (Simpler Solution):
A simpler but still effective solution could be to implement a "soft locking" mechanism. When one user is actively editing a resource, a notification or message would be shown to others (e.g., "User X is currently editing this step"), preventing accidental overwrites. This would be less complex than full real-time collaboration but still highly useful to avoid conflicting changes.
3. Version Histories:
Finally, another valuable feature would be to introduce version histories (or drafts) for flow steps or code changes. This would allow users to track changes over time and easily revert to earlier versions if needed. It would also provide a layer of safety, ensuring that any lost changes can be restored.
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