Item order sometimes changes after syncing

šŸ›Bugs
#45

Hello, All -

I am experiencing the re-ordering of items in Dynalist and I never use a web client, I only use this as an app on two Macbooks and my Android phone. 70-80% of the editing (add/edit/delete) I do on the two Macbooks. On the Android I use it to check-off items (grocery shopping usually) and rarely add something to the top of the working list as a reminder.

Iā€™m finding that the random re-ordering of items has become obnoxious - things are moved so far away I canā€™t find them right away. I paid for a year premium membership but will not renew, and will move back to Checkvist because of this. I loved Dynalist while it workd (up until about October) but canā€™t stand this any more.

For the sake of the product, I hope you guys can find and fix this defect. If you want/need dev help, please let me know.

  • Stephanie
1 Like
#46

Iā€™m really sorry to hear that, Stephanie. Unfortunately thereā€™s not much we can do at this stage towards fixing the issue other than gathering information about the bug.

So I would really appreciate it if you could answer a few questions for us:

  1. Howā€™s the quality and speed of internet on your Android phone? We heard it might be related to a slow/spotty connection, just want to see if thatā€™s the case for you.
  2. Do you use the ā€œMove toā€ feature on the Macbooks at all?
  3. You mentioned that ā€œthings are moved so far away I canā€™t find them right awayā€. How far is that, usually? For example, in OPā€™s case itā€™s only off by one, so itā€™s not that hard to find. I assume itā€™s a lot farther in your case than that?

Thanks a lot in advance, and sorry again.

#47

For all the frustrated users, I do have a workaround solution, of sorts.

Assuming my device #2 is in the wrong order, but device #1 is OK (which is usually the case; my iPad is confused by desktop generally fine).

What I do is to grab the top item in Device #1, and move it to the bottom one row at a time (i.e. hold CMD+down until itā€™s at the bottom). Then sync, and voila! the list is now in the same order across both machines.

3 Likes
#48

Thatā€™s a neat workaround. So basically make any change and then wait for the sync to correct the wrong ordering? Or is that the only sort of change that fixes the order?

In other words, is it possible to fix the ordering by changing an itemā€™s content to ā€œtestā€, sync, change it back to original content, and sync again?

Sorry for throwing the questions at youā€¦ we havenā€™t been able to repro this issue and canā€™t try this ourselves. Thanks a lot in advance!

#49

@erica I donā€™t believe that just changing an itemā€™s content will do it. When I was putting together that sample that showed the problem (which unfortunately later stopped exhibiting the behavior) I was able to edit the item text to my heartā€™s content and it did not fix the order. Iā€™m 95% sure that those type of edits will not fix it.

#50

Ok, thanks for the reply.

Have you tried what @JohnLi suggested, by any chance?

#51

I have not tried what user @JohnLi mentions.

Lately my workflow has changed a bit where I donā€™t do as much copy pasting in chunks. Rather, Iā€™ve been pasting whole sections of text (when I paste large sections from web pages it seems to paste as plain text, not rich text) and then manipulating it from there. I havenā€™t seen the issue in the last few weeks. But Iā€™m keeping an eye out for it.

That having been stated, I seems correct what he mentions. I seem to recall that if you fiddle with the order on the web client, that it resyncs the affected device. I would imagine that you have to go through the entire list like that so that the order it ā€œtouchedā€ for each item.

#52

Ok, it seems my previous impression was wrong.

So you need to fiddle with the ordering so that the affected (misplaced) item gets touched, is that right?

Somehow I got the impression that you only need to move anything on the web client to restore the misplacement.

#53

I donā€™t believe that doing anything on the web client will fix it. Iā€™m fairly certainly that editing the items themselves (text) does not fix it. It seems that if the order is touched on each item, then it gets fixed (order as opposed to content). Maybe someone else can verify these observations.

#54

Thatā€™s very interesting, and is definitely more specific than the previous information we had.

Will take another look at the code with this piece of info in mind!

#55

I just ran into this problem myself for the first time. Itā€™s incredibly frustrating. I have two devices synced, Windows 7 and iPhone. Most of my editing is done in Windows (partly because the iPhone app is quirky ā€“ often the editing toolbar doesnā€™t appear right away). This morning I spent a couple hours reorganizing my outline from the Windows app. A bunch of items which were level 3 in the hierarchy (under several level 2 parents) are now level 2 (under a single level 1 parent). They basically represent current projects, ordered by priority. I colored them according to the categories which had previously been their level 2 parents. When I opened Dynalist in iPhone, the order was significantly different. I tried the suggestion of moving the top item (level 2) down to the bottom (Ctrl-Down 18 times) and back to the top, but this didnā€™t help. I updated the iPhone app to the latest version, didnā€™t help.

Basically I donā€™t know what to do, other than manually reorder both lists to match and hope this doesnā€™t happen again. If it does, Iā€™ll probably reluctantly cancel my membership and migrate to another app.

Edit: At some point, perhaps while writing the above post, or perhaps as a result of restarting the Windows app, it seems that the Windows list synchronized to match the (erroneous) order of the iPhone list. (I had previously restarted the iPhone app, to no avail.) So I then corrected the order on Windows, and when I checked the iPhone, it now matched. Iā€™ll post again if I run into this problem again.

#56

JohnLi: Your solution worked for me. The correct, ie. most recent order, was in the Safari browser, and an older order was in the MacOS app. Itā€™s concerning still, but thanks for posting a solution.

#57

Sorry for the late reply, Marcus!

Please let us know when it happens againā€¦ we still donā€™t know what triggered it, and we have no way to consistently repro it. Weā€™ve searched the codebase for possible causes as well, to not avail.

So the best we can do right now is to gather as much information as possible. Would really appreciate it if you have more to tell!

#58

(I didnā€™t read all of the previous posts, my problem is a little bit different than described in the first post)
For me order sometimes changes when I paste a longer list (all in the same level, about 20 items, as plain text [shift+cmd+v on mac Chrome]). Document is synced, it looks ok, then I open different document and when Iā€™m back one item is way below the list and there is one empty node in the middle of the pasted list (not exactly middle, but somewhere within), but the empty place is not where this lonely item was in original list, I canā€™t just cut and paste the item in the empty place.
Iā€™m using only one tab in the browser and only one browser, Iā€™m not using mobile app, and it was happening before I was using desktop app. Maybe this will help. When this happen again I will tell you exactly how it changed the list after sync.

#59

Wooow It really works!!!Thank you very much !!!

#60

So, as an observation on this, I have definitely seen it happen on the Linux desktop version as well. If I clear the data like this:
~/.config/Dynalist/dynalist$ rm -fr data/

Then when I open the app again, the sync happens normally and everything is fine. So itā€™s something to do with sync process I believe. Maybe it doesnā€™t have to do with the data itself after all, since the next sync is fine.

Of course, I donā€™t know exactly how the sync happens (not having looked at the actual network requests using something like Fiddler). Iā€™m wondering, if items are synced individually, if it might be that ā€œlowerā€ items in a list sync before previous items, and when then do that perhaps they end up getting incorrect placement data?

#61

If thatā€™s the case, it means the local copy (the one in ~/.config/Dynalist/dynalist/data/) is corrupted. It has the wrong ordering.

After you deleted the local copy, a fresh copy was pulled from the server, which is correct.

So my guess is that basically, a diff was generated, but was interpreted incorrectly by the app, and the wrong order is saved in the local copy of dataā€¦

#62

Iā€™m getting similar issues.

Here is Dynalist opened in the Windows app and in Chrome side-by-side. Here just one item (ā€œclass 3 - 3 problemsā€) is in the wrong place, but sometimes I open Dynalist on my work computer (Windows app) and see things I wrote at home last night (also Windows app) totally messed up.

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#63

Iā€™m continuing to get this error. I type a list on my laptop, open it a little later on my desktop, and the list is in a different order. This is a critical failure of a core functionality of the software. Iā€™m really hoping for a little more responsiveness on this.

1 Like
#64

Since I experienced this error once I could not reproduce it again. And the Dynalist devs havenā€™t been able to reproduce this on their devices and thus could not investigate.

But you @Mark_Eichenlaub seem to be able to reproduce it and can help!

Please make an extra dummy dynalist document and try to reproduce this error in it.

Then go to the dynalist data files on the computer with the
wrong ordering. The path should be like this:
"C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Dynalist\dynalist\data\TdWBb9gaaxKEgezpLm8XwcOm\"

In this folder you see a ā€œ.dataā€ file for each of your documents and those data files are just text files with your document data and full of meta-data. They have cryptic names like
"document-~L5NBmXXEzHkkkpDVe6SgGF9Y.data"
and if you open them you should see something like this:
{"nodes":{"version":3,"user_version":0,"available":true,"nodes":[{"id":"root","meta":"{\"c\":\"bacon\"}","collapsed"

Find the data file for the ā€œcorruptedā€ dummy dynalist document; you can search the data files for a text string you know is in the dummy document.

Just send this file to Erica or Shida. Iā€™m sure they will learn from this ā€œcorruptedā€ file.