How to set up multiple send-receives?

Question

I'm wondering if there's any way to automate our send-receive process any more than we currently do. Here's the situation for my team: We have one main computer that connects to the Internet, and most of our work happens on that computer. It also hosts our Chorus Hub, as it's an always-on machine. Then we have three laptops that see some Paratext work, and they are only connected to the LAN in our Conference room. My idea was that all 4 local computers would be constantly send-receiving to the Chorus Hub, and then once a day or so the main computer would ALSO send-receive to the Internet, to keep me in the loop as I work as a mostly-remote advisor. That all sounds good in theory, but the reality is that my teammates are not comfortable with technology, and they often forget to send-receive, resulting in massive conflicts when they do remember and thus inefficiencies. Also, switching the main computer back and forth between ChorusHub and Internet destinations has not been something they understand or are prepared to fiddle with. In my ideal world, both these send-receive routines would be automatic in the background, but it doesn't look that's possible. Another solution I thought of would be if Chorus Hub would automatically back up/S-R to the Internet, say every day, but I don't think there's any kind of interface for that and it hasn't been developed in ages. So how would you suggest I set this up to maximize our chances of staying on track and minimizing our potential conflicts?  Thanks for any ideas.

Answer 1

Hello.

I understand the need, and there are some options to help simplify the S/R process but it is important to note that some options may require better use of technology, if a process of doing S/R is complicated, perhaps the other options are even more so.

Still there are options: 

1. The simplest is to set up automatic S/R sends from the main S/R window, as mentioned by Aroon quoting Phil.
You can set it up to do this every hour, every 4 hours, once a day, or when opening and closing Paratext.
You can set this up for each project and leave the Chorus Hub option selected to always run there.

2. The other thing is to use the shortcut. This button executes the last thing that was set up in the main S/R window. So, if the main window is set up for S/R to Chorus Hub and has the necessary projects checked, the user only needs to press this button as often as they need to.

*. You can combine option 1 and 2, for example, by asking them to use the S/R shortcut and setting it to do so every time the program is opened and closed.

3. Another option is to use Paratext Live. This maintains a real-time synchronization (like Google Docs). You can run it locally, making the main computer the server. With this all the biblical text is synchronized, and there is the option to synchronize the other documents (like notes or rendering) using the “Enchange all files” option.

This is a good option, but a stable network connection and it takes some time to get used to using it.

*. For all options at the end of the day, the host computer will have to do S/R to Chorus (to receive the changes) and then one to the Internet.

Those are the options we have within the interface. Maybe someone can comment if there is an option to create some shortcut using some php or other code, but in my experience I would say even if it is possible to execute some command, communication will always be the most important thing to be sure that the steps were done in the right order. I think any of the above options will be useful once the team is familiar with their use.

Saludos,
Pepe.

Comments

Thank you very much Pepe for your help!

Answer 2

Good suggestion from @Phil_Leckrone:

If teams open and close Paratext each day (they should) then you can set a schedule in the S/R dialog to automatically S/R every time Paratext starts up and shuts down. They can set the schedule for hourly for a reminder, but not automatic. Someone else may have a suggestion for a more automatic process.

Anyone else have thoughts?

Answer 3

PTLite has a command line option that does a Send/Receive. You'd need to get the Windows version of PTLite and then set up an automated task that runs the command, but it should be possible.

What I don't know is if you left Chorus Hub running (all the time) and ran this PTLite command in the background, it if would cause any conflicts while PTLite was syncing. My guess it that it wouldn't, but I don't know that for sure.

Comments

@mnjames I'm interested in what you said about the Windows version of PTLite. I think if I could use that command line option to S/R to Chorus in the background, then the overt S/R could go to Internet and we'd be good to go. Problem is that I can't find a Windows version of PTLite, could you point me in the right direction?

---

I apologize. I just searched and I can't find such a version. Looking back at it, I suspect I was thinking of the Linux version (I have WSL running on my Windows machine and probably was running it under that).

If you do end up getting PTLite, this post gives the commands to do a S/R with ptlite.
https://support.bible/12545/send-receive-via-command-line?show=12615#a12615

Answer 4

We have a similar situation with 20+ laptops working on almost that many Paratext projects in a workshop doing send/receive to Chorus Hub running on a dedicated laptop. 

One of us does this at least 2x/day during a workshop: 

* send/receive to Chorus Hub (gathering all the teams' data) 
* send/receive to the Internet (sharing that data with teammates not at the workshop)
* send/receive to Chorus Hub again (sharing all the data gathered from the Internet send/receive)

As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time with 20+ projects actively being edited during a translation workshop. So when it's 10:00 at night and the translators are done for the day, somebody has to wait through three send/receive cycles, one of them over a very slow Internet connection. Actually, you could go to sleep while the last one happens). Then early in the morning they have to do it again before around 7:00 or 8:00 when 20+ translators start doing their morning send/receives. Waiting for these send/receives to happen takes a huge amount of time. While it's happening, we can't use Paratext on the machine that's doing it. So I intend to set up a way to access our Chorus Hub laptop remotely so we can have it do all the work rather than one of our personal machines. 

That will be an improvement over what we have been doing. But I would love to find a way to automate this process. If Paratext can do an automatic send/receive on startup and shutdown, I wonder if it could also be made to do one on a schedule, to a particular server, at a particular time of day. I understand this is asking for a new feature. 

Since Paratext can repeat the last send/receive process by a user pushing a button, it already has the capacity to store that information. Maybe Paratext could be made to let us set up more than one automated send/receive and schedule them. Or better yet, let us set it up to do the three consecutive send/receives I described above. 

My partner commented to me that even if you can get Paratext to do the automatic send receive, it's only going to do it either to the chorus Hub or to the internet. It will remember which of those it did its last send received to and it will continue to use that until somebody changes it manually. It would really be helpful if we could get it to do a send receive to both the chorus Hub and to the internet in the order I indicated. 

I imagine the data that Paratext uses to do a "repeat send/receive" is in a file somewhere. If I knew where that was, I would be tempted to try automate switching between two versions of that file periodically so automatic send/receives could go to the right server. 

Any and all ideas are welcome. 

Comments

Thanks for your thoughts on this John. Yes, agreed, it will only automate one. I really like the command-line idea; if that is somehow made accessible on Windows, then I could come up with a script to keep ChorusHub synced in the background then the overt S/R routine could be to the Internet. That would solve my problem, and sounds like it would simplify yours.

---

This is a very interesting situation, I wish I could help more. Unfortunately I don't know, at the moment, a way to “play” with Windows and the S/R process.
 
But thinking about John's situation you describe and just trying to simplify the process I would propose to do only one S/R process at night and one more the next day.
I know we normally recommend doing two rounds of S/R when more than one person edited the project, but since the situation is complex we can think about simplifying it.

Translators would do an S/R at the end of the day (always to Chorus) regardless of the order, and they don't need to wait for all 20 one at a time, those from different projects can do S/R at the same time. At the end of the night or early the next day the main computer would work harder to compile everything. A single S/R to Chorus to collect all the changes from all the projects. One more S/R to the Internet and finally one more to Chorus (if there are no changes to receive from the Internet, you don't need to do the third S/R).

When the team starts a new day they will only need to do one S/R to Chorus (regardless of the order) and that way they will receive all the changes.
---
In other words, this would be to simplify as much as possible the process for the translators' computers, for one thing they would not need to worry about switching from Chorus to Internet every day, they would just use Chorus Hub, so they could automate it using option 2 that I mention in the previous answer.

Saludos,
Pepe.