VC state save

[ebswift]

This is on the 0829 version on Win10, I had an interesting experience between yesterday and now. Using the VC I pushed some formulas into sheets and I am *certain* I backed up the calc image. The cloud backup had a worryingly earlier timestamp than expected as if a backup hadn't saved; that is a little beside the point unless I can reproduce it some time. I went to bed leaving the VC open, and put the computer to sleep, and sometime during the night the PC shut itself off for whatever reason, so this morning was a cold start. When I re-opened the VC the latest formulas I entered were all gone, thankfully only one of them that took a lot of research to enter (EDIT: woah, actually several now that I am going back over my work). I did a small experiment, I made a change in a sheet, closed the VC, then re-opened it, and my changes stuck.

Given the above, I tried a little experiment, I entered a number into a cell (pressing enter to make it stick), then using task manager I killed the VC. When I re-opened it the new number was gone. On subsequent attempts, the number stuck consistently when I killed the process. So, it's like the VC gets to a state where its memory does not stick.

A controlled close of the program probably ensures the state gets saved, I will be closing and opening it more often now that I'm a little paranoid about the state save.

EDIT:

I watched the google sync behaviour, doing some editing on the VC. I closed the VC, there was no change to the filesystem in \My Documents\HP Connectivity Kit\Calculators\VC HP Prime. Then, upon opening the VC again the sync cranks up, the changes must be cached until the next open, then written back to the calc's folder, potentially leaving them in limbo if the PC crashes (?). Anyway, the open/close process will keep my work safe for the time being.

[Arno K]

Well, in my opinion a kill kills the program selected immediately and that is what task manager provides. So the killed program is not allowed to perform any further task, it cannot save its state to whereever it should.
Arno

[ebswift]

I did an edit on the first post, the state isn't set until the VC is re-opened after it closes. I understand that work can be lost with unexpected termination.

It would be handy for it to do some kind of periodic save without having to close and reopen the VC between steps, it is not a normal way of working with software, many of us are used to working with a save button in cases like this.

[Arno K]

(09-23-2016 10:40 PM)ebswift Wrote:  I did an edit on the first post, the state isn't set until the VC is re-opened after it closes. I understand that work can be lost with unexpected termination.

It would be handy for it to do some kind of periodic save without having to close and reopen the VC between steps, it is not a normal way of working with software, many of us are used to working with a save button in cases like this.

Well, a good idea, even the MS-Office are able to do things like that.
Arno

[ebswift]

Thanks for the replies Arno. To summarise this a bit better, I watched the filesystem to see what happens and when rather than relying on my loose observations.

Work is not saved until the VC is closed, and it is not committed to the VC state folder (the one in My Documents under Connectivity Kit) until the VC is re-opened. I've followed the VC state flow now:

The caching location is here:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\HP_Prime

Testing some conditions:

* Entering some text into a sheets field makes no changes to that folder.

* Closing the VC saves the edits and calc settings to that HP_Prime cache folder.

* Reopening the VC commits the changes into:
My Documents\HP Connectivity Kit\Calculators\VC HP Prime

So, closing the calc nicely *should* bring it back, even if the computer crashes after that (I'm not going to pull the machine power to test that). So, the guaranteed method of not losing work for now is to close the VC and reopen regularly, and have backups going somewhere (I use Google Drive) for "My Documents\HP Connectivity Kit\Calculators\" and "My Documents\HP Connectivity Kit\Backups".

[ebswift]

I placed an entry in the bugs and suggestions list under 'Save option in menu for VC state' for further consideration:

http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2eKfifdjarx