I don't get the external editing to work

[Spliff]

(I can't change the title to "I don't get the External Editing to work with the rtf editor of my choice")

Start reading below the line...


The help page is "Editing Stored Documents Externally".

The forum thread "Oddity with external editing" is not pertinent here, the recent thread "Error when saving external RTF doc" applies to a resolved but similar problem, and the thread "External editor for RTF other than MS Word?" asks for an editor suggestion for the Internet Explorer.

In the thread "Can UR alert user docs are edited externally before closing it?", Cnewtonne asked:

Can UR alert user docs are edited externally before closing it?
Often times, I use ctrl+j to open office docs externally for editing. Is there away to have UR alert me so I do not close it without closing these docs first. Few times I ended up loosing some work as a result.

You answered:

There isn't, but even if you save externally after closing UR, UR will update the stored document from the saved temporary copy on restart, so it would not be easy to lose work. You could create a scheduled task to periodically copy %TEMP%\UltraRecall somewhere so that you always have a copy of the latest external edits.

MS Word as external rtf editor works, upon "save" it stores the file in the format
C:\Users\NameOfUser\AppData\Local\Temp\UltraRecall \The-UR-Filename.urd\ItemNumber\ItemTitle (UltraRecall copy).rtf, having fetched the path and the record number from UR.

I would like to use Atlantis Word Processor instead of MS Word since it has the same functionality for my use case when I exceptionally need an external rtf editor, i.e. being able to search, and replace, special characters like tabs or the UR paragraph mark, unfortunately, in the internal UR editor, I have not found any trick to search, or replace them, by \t, ^p or similar - is there such a way?

Atlantis correctly opens the UR rtf content, but the caption reads,
"Atlantis Word Processor - [per Word (UltraRecall copy).rtf], and when I try "Save as", the suggested file name will be:

"per Word (UltraRecall copy).rtf"

and I obviously can choose the path and the filename.

When I check the above path, I see that a sub-folder "71295" has been created, which obviously is the SQLite record number of the item; in there, there is the file "71295.dat", and there is the file "ItemTitle (UltraRecall copy).rtf".

Other than with MS Word, Atlantis did NOT get that record number from UR, nor this path, so there is no way to save the, externally edited, file, "over" the original "copy" file UR has just created; Atlantis, upon "Save", lets me choose path and filename, but in order to update the "copy" file, I would need a macro which in turn would need the record number.

Thus, whatever I do, upon resuming internal editing, UR just overwrites the original item content with the stored, but NOT updated, "copy" file.

This arises the question if there is a list of applications to which UR transfers the record number and the path (as it does with MS Word, but which is "heavy" and slow in consequence, and that is a criterion when I want to "edit externally" some 50 or so items = the results from a search, my use case being semi-automated multi-item search-and-replace (!)), since only these specific applications could then be used for external UR editing?

(It's obvious I could work with the clipboard, both for cutting the content out of the UR item and into the rtf editor of my choice, and then back into the UR item (this would have the benefit though of no intermediate file to be saved, just edited in work memory), but perhaps there is a better solution?)

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EDIT: When, in Atlantis, I try to "discard" the edited file (^F4), I get a dialogue "has been changed... Do you want...", and this dialogue shows the full path to the original "copy" file, in the "Temp" folder named above; when I then leave this discard-dialogue by "Save? YES", that path is lost again, and I get the naked filename again.

This proves that even Atlantis gets (and probably all other rtf editors also get) the full path, BUT some, Atlantis among them, then apply some unwanted "smartness" and make it impossible to SAVE to a TEMP path (identified by the "\temp" part), even hiding it successfully except for a discard confirmation... from which you then, in theory, could retrieve it, macro-wise, in order to feed it into the needed "save" path...

I think I'll go by clipboard... but perhaps my unsuccessful try to employ Atlantis on this task, will help to identify similar problem causes in other contexts.


UR obviously totally innocent here!


I also forgot to share a hint for my mentioned use case and similar situations: The search result contents, with persistent search results list, are editable (and searchable one-by-one) IF you first toggle off "Search - Highlight matches" (it's also in the Quick Options).