"shared" folder only gets shared with other changes?

Question

I worked on producing a draft print with PTXPrint in a Paratext project, and when I was done, I did a S/R of the project, but the “shared” folder (where PTXPrint puts its configuration files) did not get sent. S/R said I had made no changes to the project. I had to make some other change to the project for Paratext to realize that the newly created “shared” folder was out there and also needed to be sent. Restarting Paratext did not fix the problem. So I changed a small permission, then S/R sent with the “shared” folder (and then changed the permission back). I think Paratext should check if there is a change of status of the “shared” folder when it does S/R, along with other changes that it detects.

Answer 1

This is a known issue and has been around for a long time (since 7.5, maybe?). The problem is that Paratext does not see new files added by a user without some other change. The cause of this is some caching done when determining what changed for S/R. Basically, without having opening of the S/R dialog take much longer (one or two seconds per project), it can’t detect new files in a project.
When Paratext creates a new file, it is able to update the cache so it will be S/R’d, but when a user adds a new file, Paratext has no way to know that it now exists without the aforementioned slowdown when doing a S/R.

Answer 2

Here’s a thought… What about having a specially-named file in the “shared” folder, and if Paratext sees that file it knows that the “shared” folder needs to be synced. In the process of the sync it would delete that file. (Of course you would want to choose a filename that is very distinct/unique, so it wouldn’t be created accidentally.) This would allow outside programs like PTXPrint to set that flag when it updates files to indicate that S/R is required. Just an idea…

Comments

A flag such as this would be very helpful for our team. Ideally it would trigger for settings changes within PT as well as external programs. (For example, changing a user role used to require a full S/R, which was missed in earlier versions of PT.) I know that user roles are now transferred separately, immediately if internet is available. But if there are other settings edits that require S/R to propagate, it’d be great if they could trigger this flag as well.

Thanks!

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There is already such a file: unique.id. If an external program wishes to flag that a S/R should be done, all it needs to do is write something random (e.g. a guid) to that file. The next time Paratext does a S/R it will see that this file has changed and it will do an add/remove to the local repository before sending to the remote repository.

PADev.