Closing the app in the middle of entering sightings loses all entered data with no warning

Issue #521 resolved
Rick King created an issue

At the airport I entered a lot of sightings waiting to board and when called I closed the app and turned off my computer. In the air I opened the app again to find that everything I had done while waiting at the gate was lost.

I find the normal path through the UI confusing.

  • ‘Save’ is not available when entering sightings.
  • ‘Done’ is available, but it doesn’t seem right to say I’m ‘done’ with entering sightings if I’m not. That’s what went through my mind at the gate. Ok, I should have known better, but it’s just not intuitive.
  • And if I don’t click ‘Done’ everything is lost when I close the app - WITH NO WARNING!!!!!!
  • Why is it called ‘Done’ anyway? I’m entering 292 sightings with many lifers and for those I enter a little paragraph with the idea of reminding me later of when I actually saw the bird. It can take a long time to enter the sightings from my paper checklist and write text of when I saw a lifer. If I want to or need to take a break I have to click ‘Done’? I’m not done.
  • I realize ‘Done’ doesn’t mean you can’t modify a checklist (which is what slipped my mind at the airport). Why should it be called ‘Done’? Ok, maybe ‘Done’ is good because you can automatically export to eBird and indeed you’re done then. But then why is there no ‘Save’? I expect ‘Save’ to be available whenever entering data in any program.
  • Depending on the modifying checkboxes ‘… and save’ and ‘Export to eBird’, ‘Done’ can mean one of many things:
  1. “I’m taking a break and don’t want to save the sightings I entered, but keep them for me to get back to in a bit within the same session of the app.”

    1. This is like a ‘Cancel’ with the option to recover.
  2. “I’m taking a break and save the sightings I entered.” In this case the app may be closed before getting back to entering data.

  3. “I’m done and save the sightings, but don’t export to eBird.”
  4. “I’m done, save all the data and export to eBird”
  5. “I’m done, export the sightings to eBird but don’t save them in my database.” This one I can’t come up with any reasonable use case for.

The standard for UIs since the beginning of UIs I think in this case would be select the path you want AFTER clicking ‘Done’ with the popup ‘Do you want to export to eBird?’. Also, have a separate ‘Save’ and ‘Cancel’ function.

And again, you can’t select ‘Save’, but if you close the program, boom, your data can be lost with no warning at all. I think the best would be enable ‘Save’, have the ‘Done’ button, no checkboxes, with a popup to ‘select export to eBird’, and a separate ‘Cancel’ button which would return without saving changes since the last ‘Save’. These cases would be just one more click of the Enter button to accept the defaults.

One other point is that if you do use ‘Done’ as in 1.) above, i.e., like a ‘Cancel’, the data is still there. If you continue using the app to do other things, like say bulk modify sightings for some reason, change a location name, etc., when you close then you get the popup 'do you want to save changes?'. Well, now the sighting entries you effectively wanted to cancel are all lumped together with changes you do want and so you end up having to save the unwanted sightings anyway. Or you might even forget they were still hanging out there.

Comments (2)

  1. Adam Winer

    Thanks for the report. Yeah, I definitely agree that losing without a warning is a major problem. Noticed this years ago - see Issue #179 - but never addressed it. Will do so now. (There’s another hole in issue #105 which I should also clean up.)

    Save as “commit the current set of sightings being entered” is an interesting one, but it might be the best approach. The alternative is getting a warning dialog which says “You’ll lose your sightings unless you click Done”, which is not the worst but is odd.

    I don’t plan on dropping the “…and Save” and “… and export to eBird” checkboxes. They serve their intended purpose (users that wanted automatic save on Done), however non-traditional. I don’t want extra popup dialogs after Done.

  2. scythebill repo owner

    Resolve #521: Closing the app in the middle of entering sightings loses all entered data with no warning and Resolve #179: Closing the window while entering species should show a warning confirmation and Resolve #105: Import menu item will cancel existing sighting entry without any alert

    Two changes: - Navigating away from the Enter sightings page, while there's changes entered, always shows a warning - You can select Save in the middle of Enter sightings, and it'll save the currently entered state.

    → <<cset 4c94591edcee>>

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