Problem with a sub-collection of a project

1

This is a long note. The behavior I am seeing is hard to describe and in the course of writing this note, I have noticed new aspects of it.

I am using Notenik 15.9.0 (759) on macOS 13.6.7 (22G720). I believe I updated this from the app store in the past day or so.

My usual use of Notenik is this: I have a folder named Notenik that contains 15 or so sub-folders. My usual practice is to use the “Open Project Folder…” feature (previously “Parent Realm…”) to open this folder. This give me a window in which there is a list of each of the sub-folders that provides convenient access to different sets of notes.

I noticed today that one of the sub-folders no longer appears in that list. If I open that sub-folder directly with File->Open…, things seem fine but when I close that window, a file named “- INFO-CONFLICT-N.nnk” (where N is an integer) appears in the folder.

It seems from watching a Finder window when closing the collection as if these conflict files are first named “- INFO.nnk” and then immediately renamed to “- INFO-CONFLICT-1.nnk”, “- INFO-CONFLICT-2.nnk” if “- INFO-CONFLICT-1.nnk” already exists, and so on. There is no obvious reason for this to be renamed: there is no existing “- INFO.nnk” file in this directory.

The sub-folder in question is one of the two I use the most, so I am pretty sure I would have noticed this behavior if it occurred with previous versions.

I just confirmed that this problem also occurs with the 15.8.1 (750) beta version (which I did not previously use, and have now replaced with the 15.9.0 (759) version from the app store again).

While investigating this problem, there was on a few occasions an alert about “Duplicates found within the Collection folder – see Log for Details.” This did not occur again, through repeated openings of the collection, until just now. I am not able to reproduce this reliably: sometimes Notenik issues this alert, most of the time it doesn’t.

The log says “Note titled ‘Notenik XXX’ appears to be a duplicate and could not be accessed”, but:

(1) there is in fact no file named “Notenik XXX” in the collection folder,

(2) “XXX” is in fact the name of the folder that contains the collection,

(3) a note with this name appears in the list of notes in the left-hand pane of the collection window (despite (1) above, but see see (4) below)

(4) if I delete this note, close and re-open the collection, and Notenik issues the “duplicates found” warning (which it does not always do), it creates the note (though not an actual file corresponding to it),

(5) the contents of this note, when Notenik creates it, appears to be what should be in the “- INFO.nnk” file, which as mentioned above, does not exist in this collection folder.

It’s all very confusing and there may be parts that I have not explained very well.

2

I should have been more clear that in the explanation above, “XXX” is a placeholder for the actual name of the collection folder. The actual name contains the name of my employer, which I chose not to reveal.

3

Well, first of all, apologies for the problems you’re having.

Let me ask some follow-up questions.

  1. Are you by chance storing these Notenik collections in a folder that is being synced by something like Dropbox? One reason I ask is your mention of the word “conflict” appearing in a filename. This reminds me of something Dropbox used to do. I just double-checked, and I’m not sure there is any Notenik code that would insert the “CONFLICT” literal into a filename.

  2. Are you using the standard Note ID configuration? In other words, are filenames based on the Note Titles only, without any auxiliary field being specified? (If you don’t understand the question, then the answer is probably “yes”.)

  3. What file extension are you using for your Notes? “.txt” or “.md”, or something else?

Let me know.

Thanks for reporting!

4

Try the latest beta and see if this helps.

5

Thanks as always for your prompt response, Herb. I have not yet tried the beta but I will shortly.

Your previous message prompted me to look into something else first. Yes, I do keep my Notenik project and its collections in a folder managed by Sync from Sync.com, which is very similar to Dropbox. I agree that it was Sync and not Notenik creating the “- INFO-CONFLICT-N.nnk” files.

The reason I do this is that I want to have my Notenik notes available on both my home and office machines, as well as on a laptop that I only use occasionally. I have never known if this is actually supported by Notenik. It has always seemed to work fine, though I have only been using Notenik for six months or so.

I noticed the problematic behavior on my machine at home. It was the case that Notenik was also running on the machine at the office and that both the project and the problematic collection were open on the office machine.

It may be relevant that the two machines have different versions of Notenik installed. The office machine has 15.7.0 (741).

I have now quit Notenik on the office machine and quit and restarted Notenik on the home machine.

Looking at the local copy of collection folder, there is no “- INFO.nnk” file. However, looking at that folder with the Sync.com web UI, there is one dated 12/6/2024.

I have now deleted the “- INFO.nnk” file through the web UI, quit and restarted Notenik again, and everything now seems to work as expected. When I open the project folder, the now formerly problematic collections folder appears in the list of collections, I can open and close that collection without trouble, and there are no more “CONFLICT” files being created.

So I think I’m back to where I should be. I did all of this without trying the new beta version.

I am not sure what happened here and why the “- INFO.nnk” file seemed to sort of get stuck at Sync.com. It was not visible in the Sync folders of either the home or office macs, but was in their web UI. It seems pretty clear that the stuck file caused all the problems here.

Thanks for your help figuring this out!

6

It seems that Sync works similarly to the way Dropbox used to, in that it performs a bidirectional sync pretty seamlessly unless both copies of a file have been changed since the last sync. In that case the sync engine doesn’t know which one should become the master, and so it saves one of them with some sort of conflict message in its file name. This doesn’t tend to affect the notes themselves, since you’re probably not trying to make two different changes to the same note on different machines at roughly the same time but, since the INFO file gets updated with things like window position, and the index of the last note selected, it tends to always get updated, and will probably always throw a sync error.

Unfortunately the conflicted INFO file was being seen by Notenik (at least in some cases) as a note, rather than an info file.

The beta I posted earlier tries to look for these sorts of conflicted INFO files, and then ignores them, so I believe this change should prevent the sorts of spurious note entries and duplicate messages that you were seeing.

If you get a chance to test, that would be great!

Once again, thanks for reporting!

7

Thanks Herb, I have now installed 15.9.2 (761) and will report any problems I might have. Pretty sure I’ll remember this problem and its resolution if I encounter something similar in the future.

I’ll also try to remember to quit Notenik on the home machine before leaving for the office and vice-versa but I am absolutely sure there will be times that I forget to do that. With any luck, your changes will help minimize any problems my forgetting might cause.

1 Like