We’re rolling out collaborative editing (a big day!) and want to accurately communicate to our users how auto-save works in relation to the realtime editor.
Is auto-save still happening during the editing session, it just functions differently when you are group editing?
I ask because my understanding is that when you are the sole editor of a page (i.e., ‘editing along’ in the collaborative editor version), you need to explicitly turn on auto-save - it’s not auto-saving by default.
In the Realtime Editor documentation, there are some auto-saved related limitations and it reads as though the auto-save is still happening in the background.
I assume you compare the autosave feature available when you edit outside a realtime editing session with the autosave feature used by the realtime editing session. Yes, they are implemented and work differently:
you can’t disable the autosave from realtime editing
the save interval is different between the two, and is not configurable for the realtime autosave
the realtime autosave is triggered only if there are unsaved changes, and only for the users that made those changes (in order to ensure that the author of the created revision is one of the users that made the changes)
I’m curious to know how you came to this conclusion. There’s no way to disable (turn on / off) the autosave when editing inside a realtime session, even if you are alone (which may be temporary until someone else joins the session). So autosave is always on when you are in a realtime editing session, even if alone.
The autosave limitations are mainly related to the information that is stored in the page history (revisions):
we don’t store all the authors, i.e. all the users that contributed to a given page revision auto-saved from realtime editing
we don’t separate changes per author in a given page revision autosaved from realtime, i.e. a given revision may have changes from multiple users, and you don’t know who did what.
I’m looking forward to getting more feedback on how realtime editing works for you.
Thanks for your response. If auto-save is happening automatically when the Realtime (Collaborative) Editor is turned on, how often is a new version of the page getting saved? I apologize if I missed that noted somewhere in the documentation. From reading the limitations for the feature, it made it sound like auto-save was not happening automatically (i.e., “only triggered when…”).
We were under the impression that you needed to uncheck the ‘Allow Realtime Collaborative Editor’ button from the editor toolbar because when you do that, you see the option to check ‘Auto-save’ and set the regularity. Basically, it’s not clear that auto-save is happening automatically if you’re in a collaborative editing session.
Maybe the phrasing can be improved, but the intent was to state that realtime editing auto-saves the content only if you make changes. If you just enter realtime editing mode and wait, the content is not going to be saved, because there’s no need to save. Once you make some change an auto-save is scheduled in approximately 1 minute.
What version of XWiki are you using? In recent versions the realtime editing mode has a different toolbar (check the updated documentation). This toolbar shows the save status: whether there are unsaved changes or not. So there should be now a better distinction between realtime editing (with its own autosave, that is mandatory, i.e. always enabled) and non-realtime editing (with its own autosave that is optional).
