I am almost daily now, getting the message shown in image below when making changes to apps I am authorized as an Editor. They are usually highlighted in red but this one turned blue when pulled out the tab as its own window.
I have confirmed with the only other person who could have these apps open (there are a few) that they are NOT in the apps. It getting quite frustrating as I am frequently losing changes and then have to find all the places I changed and re-insert them. There have been a few occasions when I didn’t locate all of the places and ended up with issues after pushing out the updates.
These issues actually occurred to support while I was in a chat with them. They supposedly opened this as an issue to development. But, if anything, the issue seems worse since then.
Please if you have ever seen this message inexplicably and/or lost changes due the error, please respond here so AppSheet can have an idea of how widespread the impact might be.
Yes I’ve been getting this quite a lot all this week.
When previewing the app in a desktop mode I’ve also had numerous failed syncs due to “lost communication” (with the date source I think) and it’s generally been slow at syncing.
Hello @WillowMobileSys yes. Let me explain what I’ve noticed — this happens to me often. Many times, you open the same app in two different browser tabs. One of those tabs keeps up with your changes, but the other one doesn’t. That’s where things start getting out of sync.
AppSheet keeps a version history, but it doesn’t always update in real time when you have two windows open. The active one stays up to date, but the inactive one might lag behind. For example, let’s say you’ve saved a few times and reached version 10.
But when you open the version history, it might still show version 5. So AppSheet gets confused: technically, you’re on version 10, but it thinks version 5 is the latest. If you keep saving, it might create a “version 6” based on outdated data.
That’s when the message appears asking you to refresh the browser — it’s trying to avoid version conflicts and make sure you’re working with the most up-to-date version.
Bottom line: if you’ve got multiple tabs open, or you’ve made a bunch of quick changes, just refresh your browser to keep everything in sync.
Yes, I agree, this is A way to prevent an issue. I was mainly looking for frequency of how often other tends to lose changes due to this issue.
The situation may be that you are not aware of another browser version open where changes were made by another user or you simply forgot you have multiple tabs open.
I guess my main complaint is that App Creators are informed of the need to refresh AFTER changes have already been made. The number lost could be significant. I do understand that an automatic full update is out of the question. But as a measure to prevent lost changes, AppSheet could:
Implement some way to notify other sessions that a newer version was just saved.
As soon as an edit is made check if there is a more recent version.
A combination, push out that a newer version exists and only show a message if an edit is attempted.
I don’t know if there have been recent changes or if I am now just more astute, but the issue seems to be occurring less often now. I can have two sessions open, make changes in one of them and never see an error.
This is very useful to propose as an idea. I used to save very often, but now I make many changes, and while 5 or 10 minutes of work might not seem like much at the beginning, as you gain experience, it becomes (at least psychologically) very frustrating to make so much progress only to have the changes simply erased. The fact that the editor does a scan of the latest version not in the browser but in the backend every time you go to save is a very useful idea. I suggest you propose it as an idea; many will probably agree with it, and tag AppSheet personnel.
