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?)

____________________

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).

[kinook]

I don't know about Atlantis, but testing with MS Word, LibreOffice, and WordPad, via Item | Show Explorer Menu -> Open With, editing the document, then saving via Ctrl+S, exiting and returning to UR and clicking 'Click here to resume internal editing' or Item | Edit Internally (Ctrl+Shift+0), always shows the edits from the external application. Make sure you have the file extension of the file you're editing added to 'Tools | Options | Documents | File extensions to open stored documents writeable' checked so that it can be saved.

[Spliff]

Yes, absolutely, I had mentioned that in my very first version of my post, then had deleted it (.rtf in this case, Atlantis stores natively in this format).

As said, UR does it all right (even for Atlantis), it's just that some applications - like Atlantis, obviously -, then don't save to a .../temp/... path, so the correct path is correctly transferred to the application by UR, and the file is correctly created over there, but will not be handled for saving, and this may be a specificity of Atlantis indeed, OR then also apply to some other, as exotic as Atlantis is, application, and that was the only reason I left my thread.

I had only discovered the source of the problem after trying with MS Word (which works fine, and which gave me the full path, which I then observed in further tries; the help file states %temp% but that didn't indicate it sufficiently for my, thus the full path in my post above.

"Atlantis" is a hybrid if I may say, it's far more elaborate like the usual "rtf editors", BUT it's lightweight, compared with MS Word, thus it's unfortunate that I had to discover its fail for serving as UR's external editor.

I fully understand that the internal, basic MS editor does NOT find/replace tabs, newlines, etc., and thus replacing them will not be possible internally even if you do something in the line of my "multi-item search-and-replace" suggestions.

Using an external editor here though, item by item, will produce a lot of forth-and-back, so I decided, for my typical use cases, to:

- first get a search result list (for "string ... within project = sub-tree ...")

- work on that list by copying the respective contents, one by one, into the "rtf editor", WHILE putting some special "item end string" (i.e. a special character) after each such copy-and-paste

- do the multiple searches-and-replaces in the external editor, and check / amend the results in there visually / manually (while not "touching" UR, in order to not lose the search results list)

- do the import of the (changed) item contents back into UR, using the search list again, and using the "item end characters" to distinguish the items from each other

Changes in titles being made faster by a (even free) general SQLite interface (second search "titles only" for that), or, if they are in tiny number (i.e. below 10 or 12 or so) manually.

This being said, it's obvious that very few "multi-item" search-and replaces also will demand tabs, newlines, etc. to be replaced

(or created: in the very first version of my post above I brought the example of
something: something else
becoming
something
something else),

so implementing some sort of "internal macro" doing the necessary switches between multiple entries of the search result list and the respective item contents, will obviously be of tremendous help.

[Spliff]

For my main use cases (replacing "a:b" by "a" then newline then "b"), I seem to need external editing indeed, since with the internal (MS) editor, I have not been able to select a newline, or even a double newline, and then feed it into either the "Find" or the "Replace" dialogue; if somebody HAS found a solution to this problem, I'm sure I'm not the only UR user who'd be highly interested in knowing.

On the other hand, a tab CAN be fed into those dialogues; create a tab, select it, then ^c, and ^v within the dialogues: works!