Editing, Save As, and Checksum

I am seeking a standard procedure for doing things right in EF, and have encountered some odd behavior. Perhaps I’m not thinking about it right.

EDITING

If I open a PowerPoint file in an external viewer, by double-clicking its record in EF, then:

o If I make a minor edit and save, all seems to be well (no error messages, even after quitting EF and reopening, and even looking at the Errors window).

o If I add a page, all is well (again, no error messages)

o Puzzling. So, I click on the record, click on Verify, and now I see a failure. I look at Errors and see the error expected. I click Update Checksum but nothing seems to happen. The error is retained. I quit EF and reopen. Now all is fine again. Should the error have disappeared after clicking Update Checksum, or is there an easy way to clear it? Also, was the earlier absence of an error just a matter of delay time in EF’s checking?


As above, I open the PP file and do some editing.

o If I use Save-As to give it a new name, such as vers2, saving to the same folder, then EF is understandably confused. The file appears in the Finder folder, but it is nowhere to be seen in EF the Records List.

o If I drag the new file that is in the Finder folder to the EF window, EF rejects the import, claiming that the file is already there. Hmm. Am I doing something wrong here? Or is an unfortunate feature?

o The solution: move the file out to the desktop, then into EF. EF is then happy.

Questions:
(1) what is the best and least-tricky practice for routine work in which one revises and creates a new version of a document in an external viewer?

(2) Is there or can there be some EF functionality to help? For example, I suppose EF could show as an error a file in the Finder folder that has not yet been imported, providing a click button to import it.

Thanks.

Because you’ve edited the file outside of EagleFiler, the file’s checksum will now be different from the one that EagleFiler has stored. However, EagleFiler doesn’t know this yet because it hasn’t recalculated the file’s checksum.

Perhaps it’s confusing and should be changed, but the current behavior is that Update Checksum does just that. If you want to get rid of the error message, you have to press Delete.

Yes. When EagleFiler opens the library, it automatically verifies that the files are present. It does not verify their contents unless you use the Verify command because verification is an expensive operation: it requires reading the contents of all the files in the library.

You are free to edit the files in EagleFiler’s library, but you should not add or remove files except using EagleFiler’s interface, lest it get confused. If you want to add a file to the library, you should use one of the approved means; in this case, saving into the To Import folder might work best.

If you know that you’ve changed a file, you could select it in EagleFiler and choose Record > Update Checksum. (Of course, you also have the option to ignore checksums entirely, if you don’t need EagleFiler to detect duplicates or corruption. Corruption is much more of an issue for old files that have been sitting for months or years; for files that you’re working with daily, it might not be worth the trouble to keep the checksums up-to-date.)

Yes, I do plan to improve EagleFiler in this regard, so that it can detect new files that were saved into the library and offer to import them.

EagleFiler 1.3 makes the error go away when you Update Checksum, since that’s what most people expected to happen.