Data loss

[derek_warren]

I'm working on a team of multiple content authors. An X-Edit Contributor user contacted me today to indicate that he has lost hours of work. Here is the process he went through:

1. In X-Edit (v. 1.2), he clicked File > New and chose a template we created in Flare.
2. The template opened as expected.
3. He renamed the generic heading and then clicked File > Save As to save the file using the naming convention we gave him.
4. He clicked Save and went to work.
5. During the drafting process, he clicked Save at various times to ensure that his work would not be lost.
6. When he finished, he clicked File > Send To > Email Recipient.

NOTE: He should have clicked the Send button in the content window, but either way, the symptoms appear unrelated to the method he chose to send the file, as you'll see.

7. And Outlook message opened; he added some text, saw that his file was attached. But, he noticed that the file extension was missing (no .mcco).
8. I recieved his file, but when I double-clicked, Outlook was confused...obviously it would be since there was no file extension.
9. I added the mcco extension. The result was a "corrupted data" error message.
10. I dismissed the message and tried to open the file from within X-Edit Contribute and got an exception :

X-Editerror1.png

I also imported the file to Flare (v. 5) and got a Flare error :

X-Editerror0.png

Any ideas anyone? We've had this happen twice now...losing data. The paths to the results were slightly different in that the first user not only lost his data, but his escalated so that he could not uninstall X-Edit and his machine is offline now (his words).

So I'm thinking that there is a bug, but also a best practice when creating new documents from templates and sending them out for review. In the meantime, I fear that my other X-Edit users will encounter the same loss of data, something that our schedule can't handle. Any ideas for a workaround would be much appreciated.

Derek

[derek_warren]

p.s. We located the file on his hard drive and found that, indeed, there was no extension, but the filename was the new name he had given it (not the original template name, or even "untitled"). And when we viewed the file in Notepad, it contained the original place holder text (the standard Latin stuff we had included in the template...ipsum lorum, etc). None of his modifications are there. We are now searching his hard drives for all .mcco file types in hopes that, given his effort to click Save on mulitple occasions, his content is not lost but hiding somewhere else.

[kmitchell]

.mcco files are actually archives -- confirm this by renaming any working .mcco file with a .zip extension and opening it in Windows Explorer (you will notice an HTM file, an XML file or two, and a couple of folders containing some other items). The reason for this is so that style and layout information can travel with the content to and from Flare and be integrated into the Flare project.

What seems to have happened in this case is that somehow the file was saved without an extension (this can happen if the "All Files (*.*)" as opposed to the "Flare / Blaze Contribution File (*.mcco)" option is selected in the "Save As" dialogue) and was therefore saved not as a collection of files in an MCCO archive, but probably as several files / folders strewn about in whatever directory the file was saved into.

Theoretically, then, it should be possible to just collect the several files created when the document is saved in this way into an archive and recover the work done on the document -- but unfortunately, based on my testing, it appears that changes are not preserved in the HTM file that is generated as part of the MCCO document AFTER the document is being saved as an "All Files" type and so there seems to be no way to recover data already lost after the document has been mis-saved and X-Edit is already closed. If the "Save As" type is re-set to "Flare / Blaze Contribution File (*.mcco)" and the document is re-saved at any time before the program is closed, the MCCO archive will be created properly and will preserve work done on it.

The fact that X-Edit allows the user to save a document as a null file type is definitely a user interface bug.

[derek_warren]

Great insight, kmitchell. Thanks for the response.