Re: [Gramps-devel] Save as and export

[Don A. <don...@co...>]

Alex Roitman wrote:
>> Furthermore, regarding document edition, I find quite disrupting that 
>> if you loas a document and make a modification, it is saved in real 
>> time to your file. If then you quit GRAMPS all the modifications are 
>> written to your file. I would prefer to have a Save button to tell I 
>> really want to save this.
> 
> 
> This is harder to fix. We don't want to keep all changes in memory, because
> otherwise we would not be able to work with large databases -- this was the
> problem with the STABLE that HEAD was trying to solve.


Well, I would not consider this something that needs to be fixed. This 
is the intended behavior. Real database files (not GEDCOM or XML) tend 
to be very large, and require immediate commits in order to maintain 
integrity. Maintaining multiple files isn't realistic, since large 
databases may find themselves in 10-100MB size (this happens more often 
than you would think - I was sent a testcase with 840000 people in it)

We are relying on the data in the database file to be current. Each 
screen display (including updating scrolling lists) is updated by direct 
database queries (well, actually cached database queries for 
performance). This is how we can handle large amounts of data.

Because of this new scheme of immediate commits (which matches the 
behavior of most genealogy programs and most database driven programs), 
we have added an "UNDO" capability. In this case, we maintain a separate 
log file of commit operations, allowing you to undo operations that 
you've done since the beginning of your edit session.

While a "Save" operation cannot be realistically implemented because the 
data has already been altered, we could add an "Undo all edits of this 
session", which would give you the same effect.

Don