Erased codes?

[cmaimone]

I tried coding a file. I think I accidentally entered some line breaks. When I closed the file, I got this error:

Expected the codes file to have the same number of lines as the document being coded (879), but it has 885.

Since the error didn't explicitly tell me what to do, I tried to code the same file again to fix the issue, but when codes.txt was opened again, it was blank - it had deleted my codes. That would be really frustrating if you coded a whole file and then made a mistake to have the file deleted.

[cproctor]

Hmm, let me look into this. You are correct in your interpretation, but I could be clearer in the error message, and what to do next.

The expected behavior is that you can't start a new coding session until the previous session has been resolved using --abandon or --resolve. If you wanted to fix the problem, you could open the coding file and the corpus file, update the line breaks, and then run --resolve.

I'll add clarity to the error message, add a few additional tests to confirm the program's behavior and update here when it's complete. Thanks for sticking with this :)

[cproctor]

Thank you for identifying this issue. I completely agree with you on its severity: users must not lose their coding work, even if something goes wrong. In release 1.4.2, I have taken several steps to address the issue:

• Improved the error messaging here and in other situations where coding could fail (the editor crashes; the coding file is unreadable or contains illegal codes), presenting the user with next steps. Essentially, either recover the coding session or abandon it.
• Fixed a bug by which qc was overwriting an existing coding file. Now qc will not start a new coding session when codes.txt exists. When you run qc code coder --recover, the existing coding file is opened.
• Fixed several other possible edge cases by which coding could fail.
• Added tests to confirm the behavior above is working as expected. I've tried messing up the coding process every way I can think of, and it's now well-handled.

I believe this issue can now be closed. If you would like to test these workflows, I suggest:

1. Code a file using invalid codes (codes must be alphanumeric, so try adding special characters). Save and close the files in the editor.
2. Add extra lines to the codes file.
3. Do a bit of coding in the editor, save the file, and then crash the editor (e.g. force quit).

In all cases, you'll land in an incomplete coding state, and can either recover or abandon.