Submitted by WayneK on 2018/11/12 00:17
Tonight, I selected four items then moved my cursor to the back color tool.  When I clicked on the new color, all four items disappeared from the grid.  I had no idea which items were removed (I was changing a color scheme and didn't care about the item contents).  I pulled up a backup file to find which ones were missing, and did a search which confirmed that their grid assignments had been unchecked.  I used the orphan finder to discover several more items that had been previously removed from the grid without my intent or knowledge.
 
I know there have been other cases discussed where items got unassigned to grids for reasons not always easy to understand.  It's definitely something I worry about.  The real worry is that in a grid with many items, things could go missing without realizing it.  I guess you could periodically check for orphans, but that's not going to help if the item is assigned to another grid.
 
Would it make sense to add the option to set a grid to require a confirmation dialogue to uncheck item assignments to the grid field?  Would that provide an extra level of security against unintentional removal from the grid? 
 
Not sure this is the best approach but I'd be interested in anything that would add an extra level of security.
 
In critical grids, I've thought about employing numbering schemes so I can scan down the item list to look for holes in the sequence.
 
 Wayne
110Pre8

Comments

Hi Wayne,
[quote]
When I clicked on the new color, all four items disappeared from the grid
[/quote]
I've never seen this happen, ever. Especially since items are never removed from grids after field-value changes (auto-update does not go that far, by design). Only after a refresh.
 
And items just don't lose field values, unless unchecked, moved or through field rules.
If you can reproduce it, I'd like to see what it is.
 
It seems to me a bit an overkill, though of course it could be a grid option. If the field values are changed elsewhere, it would not prevent it though.
There is already this setting which may help: In Grid Properties > Data, check: Keep source field values when demoting TLI
 
That said, you've got a few options:
  1. Edit > Undo
  2. Journal grid
  3. Item Home
  4. (and yes) Orphan search
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

WayneK

2018/11/12 12:15

Permalink

I can't vouch for what happened to previous items that got removed but I'm highly confident it happened in this case.  More detail about what happened:
 
1)  I have item back color set to identify item categories in this grid.
2) I decided one color was too garish so I decided to change it to a lighter shade.
4) Four "garish" items were visible in the current view so I selected them to start.
5) Went to my back color tool in my toolbar and selected the lighter shade.
6) All 4 items instantly disappeared.
7) I was nowhere near the properties pane at any time during this process.  I'm 100% sure I didn't uncheck the field assignment in forms or fields.  These were all TLI's.
8) At first I thought maybe they'd been re-sorted for some reason.  I pulled up the backup file and confirmed that all four items were gone from the grid (I sorted each grid alphabetically and compared them line by line).  When I found them in search, all four had the grid field unchecked.
 
I've had several behaviors crop up recently that went away after I closed and reopened the file.  Maybe this is just another one of those.
 
1) When I copied an item and pasted it into a blank cell, it added the column name at the beginning of the text.  This happened repeatedly until I restarted InfoQube.
2) When I copied text from another column and pasted it into an empty cell, it added "======" to the beginning of the text.
 
There were a couple of other odd, temporary behaviors that I can't remember.
 
I've also had 5+ white-out lock ups where I had to restart (didn't affect other open InfoQube files and nothing was lost).
 
Maybe something wrong with my system (memory?) causing occasional erratic behavior.  I don't think anything needs to be done because it's not been enough of a problem to worry about.
 
Wayne
 
 

Pierre_Admin

2018/11/12 12:27

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Hi Wayne,
 
I notice you're using a pre-release version, perhaps download the current v110
[quote]
I have item back color set to identify item categories in this grid.
[/quote]
What do you actually by this ? Is it manual or are any rules / equations involved ?
 
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

WayneK

2018/11/12 12:56

Permalink

Yes, I'll update.  Actually missed the announcement for 110.
 
The color-coding is manual at this point.  If I'm collecting links on an issue, often I'll start out by color-coding "pro" vs "con" articles just as a rough preliminary organization.  
 
I'm using tags for the "real" organization.
 
Wayne
 

I have also had two occasions where items have disappeared from grids.  It turned out that the flag had been reset, the data was not lost just misplaced, I was not able to reproduce it and not able to tell what specific action caused the items to drop out of the grid.
 
I didn't report it because it only happens very occasionally and I was not able to reproduce it.
 
It hasn't happened since I set the 'Keep source field values when demoting TLI' flag in the options but I don't know if this is significant because it only happened twice before and these occasions were widely seperated.
 

I updated to 110.
 
I went back to changing the colors of items and the same thing happened on two of the same items as before:  as soon as I changed the colors, the items were removed from the grid (it may have been when I clicked in the grid after changing the colors).
 
I tried to document the problem step by step with screen captures but, of course, I couldn't reproduce it after multiple tries. 
 
It was too time-consuming to screen capture every try so I sat and just did color changes over and over.  I  was able to reproduce the problem three times out of dozens of tries.
 
I tried to find some commonality to it but couldn't.  I tried selecting the items different ways, clicking at a different place in the grid afterwards etc but could find no way to systematically reproduce the problem.
 
In summary:
 
1) Items are removed from the grid when the colors are changed using the toolbar.  The removal seems to occur when you click in the grid after the color change.
 
2) In each case the items disappeared immediately.  That doesn't make sense because even if the grid field is unchecked, the items shouldn't disappear until the screen is refreshed.
 
3) I considered whether somehow they were being moved to subitem status below another TLI's.  I checked all TLIs visible on the screen without finding them.  When I found them in Live-Search they showed no parents, so it couldn't be that.
 
Wayne
 

Pierre_Admin

2018/11/14 18:57

Permalink

OK, looking at the code, there are a few cases where an item is immediately removed, mostly linked to the usage of context parents
  1. Can you provide the grid source ?
  2. Is there any link between the grid source and the ItemColor field ? (see field properties of both fields)
  3. Are Context parent shown ? (or set to none)
  4. If you turn off Grid Auto-update (grid properties > Options) does it still happen ?
  5. Do you have Tools > Options > This database > Data storage > Multi-user: check for ... : checked ?
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

WayneK

2018/11/15 00:35

Permalink

1) Grid source was auto-generated when the grid was created ("Papers")
 
2) Assuming you're referring to conditional formatting etc, there is no link between the two.  There are no additional settings for either in field properties.
 
3) Context parents set to zero
 
4) I turned it off.  While take a while to confirm it's not recurring
 
5) Disabled (set to 0)
 
Wayne
 

Pierre_Admin

2018/11/15 00:47

Permalink

2) No, I was referring to field auto-assign and row equations. I was trying to find a relation between the item color and the field used as the grid source
 
v110a is out and I cleaned up the code and better test to not remove items when it shouldn't
 
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

WayneK

2018/11/15 14:45

Permalink

"2) No, I was referring to field auto-assign and row equations."
 
These are just ordinary items with no additional settings, assignments, equations etc of any kind. 
 
They might have multiple parents and have subitems with multiple parents.  I'd have to track that down.
 
I'll upgrade to the new version.  Thanks for looking into this.
 
Wayne
 

The Welcome to IQ file contains the full documentation. It gets updated with every version (through IQ's built-in remote database sync). Get in the habit of using it, you'd save precious time !

FYI, the orphan search feature will be enhanced in a future version to support tags

For the record, even though the term "orphan" is used a bit in IQ, it is a shortcut as there is no such thing really in IQ. All items exist, period. (An orphan is someone that has lost its parent(s): no such thing in IQ)

Great that it will support Tags!

1. I currently got a lot of "Orphan" items that contained Tags. I assume that they should be hidden?
2. Also, those items only show that they are shown in the Journal Grid and not in other Grids that are based on its Tag Source. I assume that is because Tags are not supported yet?

I also got some strange results (not Tag related) that I will add to my new growing list of CS questions......

p.s. To search in the "Welcome to IQ file", do I need to create a new Welcome file after each IQ update, or is an old Welcome file automatically synced with the web help file?