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Warning of dynamic multi choice bug

Hi all -

I reported an issue to Ninox where the data in a dynamic multi choice (dMC) field got corrupted. It affected over half of my 1000 records that had data in this field.

I used the dMC to create records in another table so I have a backup of what was selected. Going back through my data I realized that the dMC and the table were no longer in sync. 

It looks like the dMC had all of their selections increased by 1 record. Weird. Which can have the effect of having the dMC report a selection of a record that is not in view. If you have a dMC filtered, but do numbers(dMC) it will show a record Id that is not in the visable dMC.

Anyways, Ninox has said:

Most likely the state of the fields was caused by the deletion of choice values although these values where still chosen in the fields.

We have already been able to observe exactly this cause in other cases.

No explanation of why it happened. I did not modify the root table of the dMC.

Lucky for me the selections is not where I keep my data. But for those who do you just be aware that this is an issue.

12 replies

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    • Ninox partner
    • RoSoft_Steven.1
    • 1 yr ago
    • Reported - view

    Thanks for the warning Fred 馃憤

    • Consultant and developer
    • Javier
    • 1 yr ago
    • Reported - view

    Thanks for the warning... just about to release an app for a customer that relies in lots of dynamic multi choice fields...

    • Mel_Charles
    • 1 yr ago
    • Reported - view

    Yikes !!

    was just about to link a dynamic drop multi choice to one of my tables that has over 500k records in it and then update it. think I will hold off a while

    • Fred
    • 1 yr ago
    • Reported - view

    An update, looking over my root table I did make changes. And I do make changes all the time. Sorry for the incorrect statements earlier.

    So it looks like if you never delete records from the root table then you will be fine.

    Don't know how long this has been an issue.  But we will never know when it gets fixed since they never give detailed release notes between major versions.

    • Fred
    • 1 yr ago
    • Reported - view

    Well I asked if this was fixed in 3.8 and was told to test it out. Huh? Anyways.

    Since I can't get a straight answer, I did a test and so far it looks like it is fixed. Granted it is a small test but so far when I add new records and delete records to the root dMC table the previous selections seem to stay put.

    So since the app is still in 3.7.x, this does not apply to you.

    An interesting not is that if you delete a selection it does not show it, that is good. But if you do numbers(dMC). It will show that you selected the previous deleted record. I guess that is good, but be aware of that.

      • Mel_Charles
      • 1 yr ago
      • Reported - view

      Fred Still holding off for a while - once bitten and all that !

    • Matthew.1
    • 3 days ago
    • Reported - view

    This bug is back if it was ever gone. Whenever re-organizing a database whether it be because of reloading it from the back up or using the reorganize function the ID numbers are not static. The new database is Reed skipping over any deleted records. So that the ID numbers are again continuous. The problem is that dynamic choice fields are not updated to reflect this.   I verified this for the current version of macOS a couple of hours ago and have observed it a couple of times over the past year. I don鈥檛 think it was ever resolved.   
     

     

    This is a very serious error.   It鈥檚 data disrupting.   Should be their top priority. There is no excuse for this error existing for 16 hours let alone a year.   
     

    fundamentally when reloading a database from a backup or when re-organizing it should not re -number.   That鈥檚 stupid and pointless. The ID numbers should be immutable.   
     

      • Consultant and developer
      • Javier
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

       The inability to write back an ID number when recovering a backup or importing a CSV file is a stopper for data interchange. What I would expect (like in other database management solutions):

      1. Be able to export the ID of a record
      2. Be able to import a file and use this same ID for updating data (if already exists) or create a new record with the ID provided by my CS import (if the record does not already exists)

      It's important because when we deploy a solution, and it has lots of tables and related fields, it should be possible to export a table and then reimport it and preserve the relationship between records. As Ninox uses the internal ID field, it's a nightmare to recreate ALL the relationships. It happens all the time if you develop in an staging environment and want to deploy to a production one, or if you need to restore a partial backup (not the whole database but some table) after one import action went wrong or not as expected.

    • Fred
    • 2 days ago
    • Reported - view

    Once they get the new JSON dynamic choice fields fixed maybe that will make dynamic choice fields more dependable.

    Or maybe Ninox really only intended dynamic choice fields to be a UI element and not a data storage field. But then that should have been made clear.

    I now only use dynamic choice fields as UI elements and write the selections to a table.

    • Matthew.1
    • yesterday
    • Reported - view

    So how do we get this bug reported properly.  Like it should be an emergency to the dev team.  This is central to the purpose of a database. Data stored should be reliably correct.   !!!!!
     

    • info.39
    • 17 hrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Hey,

    can you precisely write the minimum steps to reproduce this behaviour? I want to write a ticket in the German ninox-partner forum for bug-tracking. 

    Please explicitly state, how this is related to the JSON-dynamic fields, normal dynamic fields, JSON-dynamic multiple choice and normal multiple choice. 
    If you can provide a set of two DBs, one before the error and one after, including screenshots, this would help a lot. 

    From experience, the best chance to get a bug fixed in ninox is to have the abovementioned info available.
    Thanks!

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