Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 108784
After document recovery, the same document is opened twice with different contents
Last modified: 2017-05-20 09:52:56 UTC
This is actually a duplicate of Issue 95061, but I could not find a way of marking that issue as relevant to the current release candidate of OOo. I have been able to duplicate the behavior under OOo Calc 3.2 RC4 on Windows XP SP3 32-bit. What happens is: 1. Open an existing document and do some changes without saving. 2. Wait for the next auto-save of recovery information. 3. End the soffice.bin process with Windows Task Manager. 4. Open the document again (by double-clicking its file) and let OOo perform recovery. 5. When the recovered document has been opened, OOo will open it once again, but from the last saved file! 6. There are now two document windows, one where the changes are included and one without the changes. There is no marking of the first window as "recovered"; the windows appear identical unless one inspects the actual document contents. If one changes the "old" version and saves it, there is actually a warning if one later tries to save the "new" version over the changed "old" version (saying that the document file has been changed since it was opened for editing), but I doubt if many users would be able to correctly handle the situation at that stage. The behavior seems to be the same with very small documents as well as very large ones. OOo should not open the "last saved" version unless the user explicitly chooses to discard the autorecovery version, and if there are reasons to let the user open both versions simultaneously, the windows should at least be clearly marked. (Excel, for example, writes things like "[Last saved by user]" or "[Recovered]" after the file name in the window title.) If OOo Calc were completely stable, this issue might be minor, but it actually does crash spontaneously with large files from time to time.
The issue exists also on version OOO320m21 and can be reproduced under Linux with oowriter too. So it's a framework issue (don't know how to change this). It can be reproduced also easily starting from a clean document (most steps are simply the same as ottologie wrote, doubled only for completeness here): 1) Open writer (or calc, or impress, or - I didn't test the others though) 2) Edit the clean document a little 3) Save it (e.g. test.od?) 4) Edit it a little more 5) Wait until next auto-save of recovery information 6) Brutally murder oooffice (TaskManager under Windows, killall soffice.bin under Linux and the like) 7) Open ooffice with the document (Double click on test.od? in graphical file manager as Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, KDE dolphin, GNOME Nautilus, ..., or open via command line with "ooffice test.od?") 8) Do the recovery You get two documents, (on Linux) the window titles say "Test.od?" and "Test.od? <2>". This doesn't help to decide, which one is the version to continue work on. I would follow ottologie, that at least it must be obvious to the user, which window shows the "recovered" and which one shows the "last saved" version. Even better would be to make it explicit, telling the user in a dialog, that he may get two versions of the same document (i.e. modifying the same file!) and gives him a choice how to deal with it. What about a dialog offering the following choices: * "Edit last saved version (skipping the recovery)" * "Edit recovered version" * "Edit recovered version and last saved version side by side" (or even do it in the "Edit -> Compare documents..." mode?!?)
Duplicate according description. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of issue 95061 ***