[4.x]: Autosave Drafts reloads all other languages of an entry, not just the language where the change was made

[proimage]

[4.x]: Autosave Drafts reloads all other languages of an entry, not just the language where the change was made

[brandonkelly]

Hey @proimage, couple updates:

• I found and fixed a bug where the scroll positions weren’t being maintained properly on reload, when more than two tabs were open to the same entry’s edit page.
• Craft 4.10 and 5.2 will allow plugins to partially¹ disable auto page reloading, and Redactor² will take advantage of that when in fullscreen mode, once Craft 4.10 and 5.2 are out.

You can update to Craft 4.10 / 5.2 and the Redactor change right now by setting the following constraints in composer.json, and then running composer update:

// Craft 4.10
"craftcms/cms": "4.10.x-dev as 4.10.0-alpha",
"craftcms/redactor": "3.x-dev as 3.1.0-alpha",

// Craft 5.2
"craftcms/cms": "5.2.x-dev as 5.2.0-alpha",
"craftcms/redactor": "4.x-dev as 4.1.0-alpha",

¹ Other tabs will still reload when a provisional draft is first created in the active tab, or when a draft is deleted/applied, because it’s crucial that all tabs are working with the correct revision at those points.

² I’m assuming that’s what you’re using, but the same logic could easily be applied to other rich text editors (besides CKEditor, which doesn’t have first party fullscreen mode).

[brandonkelly]

Craft 4.10.0 and 5.2.0 are out, as well as Redactor 3.1.0 and 4.1.0.

[brandonkelly]

This is working as intended. The other tab will get refreshed because something about its content may have just changed, e.g. any non-translatable fields, or things like the entry’s post date.

[proimage]

Ok, that makes sense... so what about autosaveDrafts being deprecated? Is that replaced with something else, or is there just no way to prevent autosaving drafts going forward?

[brandonkelly]

autosaveDrafts was added in Craft 3 as a temporary solution to make content editing more tolerable on installs where saving an entry took several seconds each time.

That hasn’t been the case nearly as much in Craft 4+, and we’re continuing to find ways to improve performance with each major release, and the plan is to remove it once long save times are fully resolved.

So it’s a performance hack; not meant to be an alternate workflow you might want to opt into.

[proimage]

I've updated the site in question to Craft 4.x, and the auto-refreshing is more disruptive than expected. The content is long-form, so smallish WYSIWYG fields don't really cut it, which is why the content editor has the WYSIWYG fields in their full-screen modes. There are multiple language windows open in parallel, each with their WYSIWYG in full-screen mode. Whenever changes are registered in any of the open windows, they all refresh, which exits them out of full-screen and reloads their pages, losing the place in the long-form content being edited.

For now, what they're doing is pasting the English reference content into a temporary entry, and only editing one translation at a time. Obviously, this greatly slows down the editing process.

So this is a multi-tasking, content-editing related issue, made difficult by the Autosave Drafts feature.

Do you have any suggestions?

[proimage]

Thanks, @brandonkelly, that looks like those changes should address the core issue. :) As I understand it, Redactor scroll positions will be kept more consistent due to a bugfix, and in full-screen mode (which I presume cannot be automatically re-triggered when an auto-save + page refresh happens), there's a way for Redactor to pause autosaving.

My main question is CKEditor. With Redactor being deprecated, I had planned on transitioning over to CKE either under Craft 4.x or 5.x, but if CKE has no full-screen mode... is there a plugin that provides that functionality?

[brandonkelly]

There are a couple third party plugins that add it, like this one, but I have no idea how reliably they are.

There’s an open feature request for it to be added as a first party plugin here.