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sartography / spiff-arena

SpiffWorkflow is a software development platform for building, running, and monitoring executable diagrams
https://www.spiffworkflow.org/
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
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Saving files - behaviour #1643

Open sashayar13 opened 1 month ago

sashayar13 commented 1 month ago

Currently, there is no "Auto-save" functionality for files - BPMN, DMN, JSON if they are opened through an editor. The only place where changes are auto-saved is Form Builder, which auto-saves changes for JSON files.

There is a need to design the standard saving behaviour - either changes are saved by pressing the button "Save" in all places, or it auto-saves changes. If the auto-saving is chosen - there is a bunch of additional functionality needs to be introduced - TBD

sashayar13 commented 1 month ago

@harmeet-status this is a new workstream which needs to be started

harmeet-status commented 3 weeks ago

Great idea. The only thing that would concern me is that I go into process models and tinker with them all the time, just to quit and not save any changes.

We need to solve for this, otherwise accidental changes will be saved.

Any ideas? @sashayar13 @calexh-sar @burnettk @danfunk

burnettk commented 3 weeks ago

Google docs should be the vision here. You never lose your work. Undo works perfectly.

Quote from a slack I’m in:

I remember reading Alan Cooper's book About Face in the 90's and found really compelling his proposal to eliminate the File / Save workflow, since it's the job of software to protect users from dangerous things like losing their work if the software is terminated unexpectedly. It was funny because everybody thought his ideas were great, but nobody would actually implement them.

Fast forward to the present and we have Google Docs / Sheets / etc. and similar web software that actually executes a well thought out approach to eliminating the user's responsibility to save their own files, providing an ability to roll back editing mistakes, etc. It's very satisfying.“

Would really excellent undo solve for the use case with tinkering and then desiring to not persist the changes?

harmeet-status commented 3 weeks ago

We could also introduce an edit button, only after which you can start editing, otherwise read-only.