Moving item with links attached to it to another doc breaks links

as title states

Steps to reproduce:

  1. On document A
  2. Write some notes, grab link Y
  3. Write some notes elsewhere, paste link Y somewhere
  4. Move notes with link Y attached to document B

links are broken now, link Y no longer works

2 Likes

Hi @Vincent_Tang, sorry for the digging this up, must have fallen through the cracks back then.

Unfortunately links are not supposed to work after moving to another document. If you want to can add a feature request for preserving the internal links after moving.

Closing this for now! Weā€™re cleaning up bugs before 2018 comes :slight_smile:

2 Likes

This is one that seriously impairs usability of dynalist in a professsional setting.
In rearranging projects and actions, often items get moved to other places.
When these items are linked to, those links are broken after moving the item.
The links should automatically be updated or a link to the new location should automatically be placed where the item was before moving it.
Has this been added to the features list yet?

2 Likes

Agreed, this has become a big problem for me as well. Iā€™m inclined to try merging everything into one document to avoid breaking links when reorganizing in the future. Unfortunately, doing so will break all links except internal ones within whichever document I decide to use as the master document.

Update: I did merge everything into one document and fixed the most important links, and this worked very well for a while. But then the one document got so big that the performance became significantly degraded, so I had to split it apart again, breaking most of the links in the process.

Iā€™ve been asking for a fix for this for months and months but it has fallen on deaf ears.

@Erica This topic shouldnā€™t be closed. This really needs to be fixed.

Weā€™ve had some recent internal discussions about implementing some kind of link-fixing/updating capabilities as you move things across documents - it might not perform very well if youā€™re moving a lot of items but itā€™s better than nothing.

Reopening this so we can track it on the forum, thanks for the ping!

4 Likes

Just wanting to +1 this.
I was very surprised to see that links break when moving across documentsā€“but only realized after doing major reorganization.

1 Like

Yep,

This feature is BADLY needed.

Also, cutting and pasting obviously should NOT break links neither change creation date.

2 Likes

Just want to quickly update everyone on this - The reason why this is not so simple to implement is that when you move an item, you are potentially moving many items (all children items).
This means that we need to perform a global search in every single document in your Dynalist for every single item that youā€™re moving. Depending on how many items you have, this could cause significant performance issues so we want to be careful in our implementation to avoid having the app freeze when that happens.
But yeah, weā€™re planning to get this fixed soon.

As for cut & paste, it would be significantly harder to detect and fix, so if anything weā€™ll need to address that later.

5 Likes

Great to hear that link-breaking is going to be addressed soon!

LOVE the app BTW!

2 Likes

ive been using the item finder a lot more recently so i decided i would try out having everything in 1 document again like i did with workflowy. not a good idea! it was extremely laggy so i switched back to separate documents which is fine but theres a lot of broken links everywhere now which is a bit of a pain. oh well.

note to self: always do a backup right before you make any major changes!

Any update on this issue Shida?

3 Likes

+1
Would love to know if a fix is coming.

Any news on this? I also need this! Why donā€™t you keep track of all the pointers to an item at the item itself? Then it would be easy to update all links when an item moves.
Or you could mark all items that potentially have a link to them and track for each of those links where it should be forwarded in a database. On first access of an item that points to a non-existing link you make a lookup in that database and update the link. maybe also add an option for a user to force this updating for all links so that the forward database can be dropped.

I guess this feature on trello https://trello.com/c/nZtjbyyn is related. Can you confirm that this will solve this problem. If so, when can we expect this update?
Thank you for your amazing work!
Best,
Robin

Although done in a completely different way and with totally different language and tools (just guessing), the Dynalistā€™s sibling has this feature implemented, and it works pretty well. However, each document is treated as a .md file whereas in Dynalist itā€™s notā€¦

I wish DL could have the same implementationā€¦ But it all depends whether itā€™s feasible or not.

ā€œ(ā€¦) Obsidian currently supports two types of links: 1) To files 2) To headings inside the files. It also supports auto-updating all backlinks when the file name is changed.ā€
Auto-update backlinks to headers on header title change - Feature requests - Obsidian Forum

To complement it, Obsidian not only auto-updates the backlinks when the filename is changed but also when any relocation is made to any internal file. The ā€œreferenceā€ is kept.

Hi @Erica and @Shida

Sorry to bother you about this issue, but Iā€™ve been holding off re-organizing my Dynalist for ever due to breaking links and this feature would help greatly!

Thanks

1 Like

Sorry itā€™s taking so long >.< Iā€™ll try to find some time for this soon!

4 Likes

Awesome! I was just looking for this because we were thinking of keeping our contacts here. Tested moving it before implementing and luckily I did that because it broke. :confused: Thanks @Shida, this is definitely needed!

PS. The program Obsidian (which I believe shares devs with Dynalist?) has this feature implemented and it doesnā€™t seem to slow down vaults there, even when theyā€™re really big. Idk how theyā€™re doing it, but I think it should be possible to do without massive performance hits!