Conlfuence 4.0 - confirmation after hitting Cancel
Asked by Tim Milner:

Hi. I have been reading a bit about some users' requirements that Confluence conform to other wikis, which on hitting Cancel when in RTE mode, instead of shutting down your page and losing all your edits in one click, gives you a confimration (Are You Sure? Yes/No) choice, so to avoid the instances where people click on Cancel instead of Preview.

I have followed users' requests, and Atlassian's answers, but hvae not yet found anything that confirms whether this is infact functionality that exists now or not. In early 2011, Atlassian seemed to be saying that they will address this in the new build. Is this now a feature of Confluence 4.x.x?

Appreciate any insight.

Thanks,

Tim


Answers:
author: Andrew Frayling
body: Hi Tim,

Just tried on Confluence 4.1.4 and Cancel cancels without prompt though Confluence does auto-save at a configurable interval (<http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Configuring+the+Time+Interval+at+which+Drafts+are+Saved>) and if you return to a page that was not properly saved, but was caught by auto-save you are prompted with:

"A version of this page you were editing at Feb 27, 2012 16:15 was not saved. Do you want to view the change, resume editing or discard it?"

This auto-save only catches accidentally navigating away from the page edit though, if you cancel it assumes you deliberately meant to cancel and you are not given the option to resume editing.

Is that good enough to match your user requirements? Confluence catches accidental losses, but assumes Cancel means you meant to cancel.

Andrew.

comments: author: Tim Milner
body: Thanks Andrew, that is what I needed to know. Do you know if 4.x.x was the first version to autosave? It rings a bell, but now thinking about it, I'm not sure if I'm thinking of something else or not. That would be of use in situations where you have talken an hour to creata page and then clicked Cancel by mistake, as it may have saved most of it at least. Not sure it will be enough to match the user issue that has been raised, though.


author: Andrew Frayling
body: You're welcome. Looking at the release notes autosave has been there since 2.1 (<http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF35/Release+Notes+2.1>) though I think you used to have to view your profile to view your drafts.

Only other similar change I can think of is the way Confluence used to handle concurrent editing, where if edits overlapped you used to only have the options to discard your changes or overwrite the other person's, but now you get options to discard, overwrite or merge (<http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Concurrent+Editing+and+Merging+Changes>) - but that's not new to 4.x.x, that was introduced in one of the 3.x.x releases.

I think I found the improvement request that discusses adding a confirmation to the cancel button (<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-7526>) which did have a comment saying it would be addressed in the new editor, but that hasn't happened and looking at the issue it's not been scheduled on a backlog so I wouldn't expect to see it any time soon.


author: Tim Milner
body: Yep, that's the improvement request I saw, and that's what prompted me to wonder if it had been addressed in 4.x.x. And yes, the merge option for concurrent editing is in our version too, at 3.5.7. A lot of our technical staff can't understand why there isn't a confirmation pop-up, as exists on any Windows, Mac, or Linux application. Thanks for your help, though - at least it's a simple answer of nothing I can do.


author: Joe Clark
body: If this really concerns you, you could try hacking on some javascript onto the Editor cancel button to do your own annoying prompting. :-)

comments: author: Tim Milner
body: Yes, did consider that too. But at the moment, it's only a small subsection of staff who have requested it. I personally don't experience this as a problem, so for now, will just hope it goes away. For each person who wants it, there are about 100 people who will fire abuse at me for adding it!