When two edits collide
It happens in every shared archive: you and a colleague touch the same record before synchronising. ArchiView does not choose for you and never overwrites silently.
First: most cases are not conflicts
If you changed different fields of the same record, the two changes combine by themselves, field by field. No window, no decision to make: it is the most frequent case and it is handled without disturbing you.
A real conflict only exists when two people changed the same field in different ways.
The resolution window
It shows the disputed field with the two versions side by side, yours and your colleague's, and lets you choose which to keep, one decision per field.
The starting point is already the merged record, with every non-conflicting change already incorporated: choosing for one field does not lose the other person's work on the remaining fields.
To choose, click anywhere on the version you want to keep, Your Change (Local) or Cloud Change (Server). With the keyboard: Tab to move between them, Enter or Space to choose.
When the program cannot tell what changed
To work out who changed what, the program compares both versions with the last one downloaded from the server. If that reference point is missing (a computer's first connection, a very old archive), every difference between your record and the server's opens the conflict window: the program would rather ask you one more question than take a wrong decision.
If sending your changes fails (no network, server error), your local work stays as it is and goes out at the next synchronisation.
Deletions
If someone deleted from the server a record you still have in your archive, the program tells you instead of letting your work vanish without warning. For each record you choose whether to keep your local copy or delete it from your archive too, then confirm your choices; cancelling the download postpones the decision.
How to reduce their number
- Download before you start. A conflict almost always stems from a local copy stuck at yesterday.
- Upload often. Changes accumulated over weeks are conflicts waiting to happen.
- Divide the work by fonds or by series, not by field.
- If you know two of you have to work on the same document, agree on it in advance: it is quicker than resolving the conflict afterwards.
If you chose the wrong version
Ctrl+Z straight away. If you notice later, the record has a history from which to recover the previous version, and the archive has local snapshots.