Close metadata editor without saving raises no warning?

[matthias-ronge]

We have observed that if you have been working in the metadata editor, then you close with the "Close" button, it goes away, but there is no warning of the form: "Do you want to exit without saving?" This is functionally correct, but we were surprised because we felt we were expecting a warning pop-up.

Question: Is that intended? Should we include a warning, or is it fine without?

[andre-hohmann]

In my opinion the warning would be helpful, when it really appears only after changes have been made. If it appears always, i think it will be annoying. I often open the metadata editor to examine the metadata without changing anything.

As in Kitodo.Production 2.x no warning appears, i think that most users are used to the behaviour without a warning message. I never heard that this has caused loss of metadata. Thus, for me it is not of high priority.

Maybe there are other experiences in other institutions.

[matthias-ronge]

Yes, I only meant when something was actually changed.

It looks like this is a bug. There is such functionality implemented (Variable workpieceOriginalState in class DataEditorForm) but it doesn’t work under all circumstances.

I added the invalid label because the error description is too imprecise (I first have to test exactly which changes are not correctly noticed; unfortunately I don't know anymore either).

[solth]

In my opinion it is not a bug that the warning does not appear when the user closes the metadata editor explicitely using the "Close" button, because it suggests he discarded changes deliberately. At least that is how it is implemented right now.
Instead, atm the warning is implemented to only be shown if the user closes the editor by any other means (clicking another link like for example a breadcrumb link or the Kitodo logo in the upper left, manually entering a new URL in the browsers address field or closing the tab/browser altogether).

This behaviour is still bugged at the moment, though, because the warning currently often occurs even when the user did not actually make any changes to the workpiece at all.
After analysing the current behavior, I found out that the follwoing two actions cause this wrong "Unsaved changes" warning dialog even though no real changes were made to the workpiece:

• the user selects a structure by clicking on the corresponding node in the structure tree or gallery stripe in the gallery. Reason: the group property of MetadataGroup instances of the selected structure in the workpiece variable of DataEditorForm is set to ArrayList<Metadata> when the user clicks a structure element, whereas the corresponding group properties in workpieceOriginalState are of type HashSet<Metadata>. The method MetadataGroup.equals (which is used for detecting changes) compares - among others - the class of the group property, resulting in workpiece and workpieceOriginalState being evaluated as different (because HashSet is unequal to ArrayList)
• the user clicks on an unpaginated page/media in the structure tree or gallery. Reason: when a page is first saved to the workpiece without explicit pagination, it's ORDERLABEL attribute will be set to " - " (with leading and trailing whitespace). When selecting the page in the metadata editor once (without paginating/changing it), the ORDERLABEL is set to "-" (without leading or trailing whitespace), which again results in the workpiece and workpieceOriginalState being evaluated as differenct.

I opened a pull request to fix these two errors: #5536

[solth]

@kitodo/kitodo-community-board is the current behaviour described in my comment above sufficient in your opinion or should the implementation be changed to also display the "Warning" dialog when explicitly closing the metadata editor with unsaved changes via the "Close" button?

[subhhwendt]

We discussed this issue in the community board and we can confirm that the current behaviour of the button is the expected one.