A few related points I was hoping to suggest/discuss:
- Undo/redo steps
I was wondering if undo and redo can be implemented as their own kind of steps instead of replaceStep etc. I see a few advantages here -
space - when these steps are stored on the database they will be small and constant in size as opposed to what happens for example if the user select an entire document then hits del then undo then redo which means the entire document is stored an extra two times.
Bandwidth - this becomes really important for collab, in the scenario above, all clients will be sent the entire document twice, instead of just two small steps
Also - this will allow adding special properties to these steps, in particular the clientID which leads me to the second point
- Undoing other clients steps
At the moment, collab does not add steps received from other clients to collab history. There is a strong use case for that. If I type at the end and another user edits in the middle, I want to just type and be able to undo/redo without his edits affecting me, as if he’s not there
However, there is also a very strong use case for the other way. I went for coffee and when coming back realized another user messed up the document. I now want to undo those edits but can’t. This will be incredibly useful and will remove the need for implementing complicated versioning etc giving a lot of peace of mind to the user
One idea I was thinking about is for history to receive all undo/redo in special steps as suggested above and store the client Id in them. There can then be a command (connected to a menu button for example) to toggle whether subsequent undo/redo will or will not include other client’s changes. This will give the user the best of both worlds in a relatively simple way (compared to automatically generated revisions for example)
- Pushing steps to history undo
Again bringing up the discussion here as there was no resolution. Can there be a way to allow a collab client to load previous steps and push them to the history undo buffer so as to allow travel back in the document history ?
I played with that quite a bit and I’m pretty sure it’s not possible without API support in history to allow pushing (inverted) steps. Has there been any more thinking on getting this done ? This will be an incredibly strong feature.
Thanks !