08 January 2013, 22:43

Hello!

One of my students made a copy of last semester's page (he structures his portolio according to the semesters of the education programme) as this spring semester's page. He then erased text in the text blocks of the new page to prepare for new texts. He then discovered that the texts in the text blocks of the copied page were also erased.

I tried this myself. I made a copy of a dummy page, erased a few lines of text in one of the text blocks and saved. I got the same result! The text was erased from both the original and the copied page. I suspected this is a bug, otherwise the logic is obscure. So I checked again and it says, if you scrutinize, that changing a certain text block will also change it in another page where it is used and that I can make a copy of it instead.

I think this is counter intuitive, since you expect every item on a copied page to also be copies. Also, the information that this not so is easy to miss.

I suggest an improvement. All items on a copied page should also be copies per default, with the option to link items between original and copied page. That is, the direct opposite functionality compared to now. That would be more logical and intuitive I think.

Odd Steen

14 January 2013, 23:37

I fully agree. I've never felt comfortable with the way that the notes linked rather than copied and I have expressed this concern before.

I've just had students copying a whole collection (as the structure for their 2 portfolios are the same and they were deleting content from their second one) and delete content from their first porfolio.

When I tried to restore the backup database to before they did this, the database got corrupted and I'm now going to have to get the server restored from backup tapes.

It makes more sense for the notes to copy as default with the option to link, rather than the other way around.

15 January 2013, 20:39

edit

28 January 2013, 5:57

If I understand this process correctly, the updating of textboxes does not take place when a user copies a page or collection from another user? Only when I choose to edit a textbox belonging to me (copied or not) does this process kick in. It is confusing though when I make a copy of something that I already have that both the original and copy are still linked by default.

03 March 2013, 19:40

Hello,

Further information and potential enhancements are discussed at https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=4827 Thoughts are welcome to nail the improvements down.

Cheers

Kristina