VRJConfig external modification detection misbehaves

I cannot quite repeat the behavior as you have described it. However, did a dialog box open stating that a .jconf file was modified externally at any point while you were editing your configuration? That window pops up all too often on Windows, and it appears that there is a bug tied to reloading the file while editing it. (There is also a bug related to the determination about when the file has been modified externally, but it only seems to appear on Windows.) If that dialog box opens after you make a change to a config element and you click the "Yes" button, then the change you made gets lost somehow. It stands to reason that reloading the file from disk would cause any unsaved changes to be lost, but the problem is that the change still shows up in the GUI. When the file is saved later, that change displayed in the GUI is not written to disk.

If you did not see this dialog box, then I do not know what is causing your problems. I cannot repeat the behavior you have described here, and I can assure that the symptoms would not be anywhere near as specific as you have described them. The basic low-level process of editing a property value in memory is the same regardless of the config element type. For that reason, I am inclined to believe that something else is going wrong. If you can provide a much more specific, step-by-step process of how to repeat the problem, that would be helpful.

From Doug McCorkle:

Yes. What you described with the dialog I did experience. I am running on suse 9.3. All the effects of the dialog I also saw with the window updating but not the the file. I never did say "no" to not loading the changes so I can not provide any feedback there. Also, it seemed that I would get the dialog even if I didn't change an element but just let vrjconfig run in the background. I am not sure about that but can test again this evening.

Thanks for noting the dialog as I thought that was due to something that I was doing and not an issue with vrjconfig.

The external modification detection feature of VRJConfig does not work as well as it could. On Windows, the dialog box notifying the user of possible external modification pops up every time the window regains focus. Worse yet, unsaved modifications in the context editor window persist even after the .jconf file is reloaded from disk.