CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The staff that I support are having issues with editing data with multiple tabs open. It seems there is a bug in Civi that affects a lot of different forms, making it dangerous to edit multiple pages at once. Exactly how does this bug behave? What are the clear steps to work around it? When will it be fixed?

For example, one staff member reported that he was editing the "thank-you" section of a contribution page by copy-pasting some bits of text from the "thank-you" section of another contribution page... and once it happened that all the information in the fields was erased upon clicking the "ok" confirmation to navigate away from unsaved changes, and then another time it happened where all the values for one page were overwritten with the values from another. I have heard similar stories from staff members about editing contacts. These cases are complex enough where I have trouble reliably reproducing them, but they happen often enough for me to be pretty positive that there is a serious bug here.

What instruction can I provide staff in order to avoid these issues? Clearly having only one tab open at a time is a huge limitation in workflow efficiency, and also it will be nearly impossible to enforce.

I'm using CiviCRM 3.1.1 and Drupal 6.9 with PHP 5.2.10 and MySQL 5.1.37

isn't it going to be fixed on the 3.2 ?

X+

The basic premise is always have only ONE edit window/tab open for any object (i.e. contact or Contribution Page or Event Page etc)

Sometimes it's not really realistic to use only one edit window, though. For example, copying the thank-you and receipting settings from one contribution page to another... you have to have the edit window open to read the data from the source contribution page, and you have to have the edit page open to write the data in the target contribution page. Because there are so many different fields on the page, it would be a big burden to copy paste each individual field into a separate text file (for example).

My instruction to staff for such cases is as follows: "When ever you save a page you are editing, make sure that the page you are editing is the page you have most recently loaded in your web browser."

The above instructions are base on the following observations from me:

• problems seem to arise when: loading "edit-page-1", then loading "edit-page-2", then making changes to "edit-page-1", and saving "edit-page-1"
• problems don't seem to arise when: loading "edit-page-2", then loading "edit-page-1", then making changes to "edit-page-1", and saving "edit-page-1"

Even with these instructions though, staff are still having problems; so I'd like to get a better understanding of exactly what steps produce unexpected behavior. Surely someone else must know better than me since my hypothesis (and consequent instruction to staff) is based purely on simplistic observation. Can anyone offer a more specific (or more accurate) guideline for how to work around this bug in a way that will allow people to copy values from one page into another page?