Was trying Dorico for iPad and I imported a current file from Dropbox last night. I noticed that the modification date for that file on my computer was updated to the time I opened it on my iPad. Just now, I opened Dorico on my iPad, opened the file that was in the recent items tab and it was not updated from what I had done earlier today, but was at the same point I left it last night on my iPad. Sure enough, it overwrote the latest version on my computer since that is synced with Dropbox. No big deal; I have clones and Time Machine backups, besides the backup that Dorico creates on my computer. But it seemed odd that the previous iteration of the file on my iPad overwrote the one in Dropbox instead of it syncing with the latest version in Dropbox. Anyone else have a similar experience? It does make me leery of using the iPad version of Dorico unless I only use a duplicate of a file rather than opening an existing file, either in Dropbox or iCloud.
I couldn’t exactly understand what happened to your documents and what you were expecting.
Regardless, I am pretty sure that Dorico doesn’t have anything to do with Dropbox syncing. Dorico doesn’t even know if an opened file is from Dropbox nor does it care. It simply presents the system document picker which allows it to access selected files outside its sandbox. After you edit the document, Dorico saves it back and its work is done there. The system should inform the Dropbox extension that the file is changed and Dropbox should perform syncing. This is not specific to Dorico, it’s the way iPadOS works. To test if the syncing works properly for you, you can make a text file on macOS, save it to Dropbox and then open it from Dropbox in some editor on your iPad that also uses the document picker and see what happens.
I use documents in Dropbox all the time in my iPad. Everything is synced. That’s why this was unusual. If I edit a Dorico file on my iPad, close the app, work on it on my Mac and save it (all in Dropbox since that is where my important files reside), then the latest document version should be opened in iPad Dorico. What happened instead is iPad Dorico reverted the latest version of my file to the one it had opened the night before. Unlike every other application I use in iPadOS that involves documents I might access from Dropbox or any other cloud service, Dorico did not access the latest
version but relied upon the version it must store somewhere on my iPad. It considered that as the “latest version” and overwrote the Dropbox version even though that file had a more recent modification date.
I’m not going to be using the iPad version of Dorico any further. But I did want to apprise folks about my experience. The normal behavior should be that iPad Dorico accesses the document version in the cloud server. Not store the old version and then overwrite a newer file. The correct behavior is seen with all MS office apps, PDFExpert, etc. I’m not thinking this is an iOS or Dropbox issue.
I cannot check this myself at the moment, but isn’t there an “open in place” option somewhere? From your description it seems to me that this might indeed be an issue at least partly caused by iPadOS’ notorious file management.
Not sure. The only option I had was to click the import file button on the lower left
klavierpunk is right, on the iPad (once you have opened any .dorico document) you can open the Dorico preferences. There you will find “open in place” which means, Dorico will save back to the place from where you opened the project file.
If you have not done this yet, don’t despair. Have a look at the local “Dorico” folder on your iPad. Your file might have been saved there.
From the description, it looks like Dorico does open the file in place, but then replaces it with its own cached version instead of using the opened one.
There is no such folder on my iPad. I retrieved my file from a Time Machine backup.
ikos, we don’t know yet, how dtoub has set his Preferences.
The setting is not primarily for from where Dorico opens a file - but rather, where Dorico saves the file to.
I didn’t set any preferences for saving files so it would be the default.
As far as I know, the default is saving to a local folder on the iPad, called Dorico.
It is on the top level of folders, if you open the file browser via the Files application:
I have changed my default location to iCloud Drive, btw:
Nope. No folder like that was created on my end. Nothing ever displayed in that tab nor in iCloud m. I always had to import.
Have you had a look in your iPad Files App?
There will be a local Dorico Folder, which might be worth inspecting…
I also looked up an article from 2022, which is suitable as a start on this issue:
Thanks. Did not know that from only a cursory use of the iPad app. But it sounds like there still may be some quirks with Dropbox specifically. Anyway, I was mainly playing with the iPad app to just check it out and will continue to use the macOS version as I’m still learning Dorico after over three decades with Finale.
But there is also Open or Import File button which presents system document picker where user can select files stored outside Dorico’s local and iCloud sandboxes (files from local folders, iCloud drive or any third-party file provider such as Dropbox).
Open or import implies that user can choose whether Dorico will open selected file in place or copy (import) it to its own local folder. From what I can see, Dorico always opens selected files in place and never imports them. And this is expected default behaviour. You probably don’t want to copy Dropbox documents. The only confusion is the import word in button’s label.
Files can also be opened from the Files app, instead of using Open or import file. The same behaviour applies.
I can think of two possible explanations for the unexpected behaviour OP noticed. Either Dorico replaced the file with its own cached version (I doubt that, but who knows) or the file had not synced from Mac at the time it was opened in Dorico for iPad. In that case, Dorico opened the old version, saved it back, Dropbox got notified and synced the new-old version overwriting changes made on macOS. But shouldn’t this kind of vesrsion conflict be smartly resolved by Dropbox?
No, it had long synced with Dropbox. I think it was a cached version on the iPad…
But had you checked if Dropbox on iPad recieved that synced version from Dropbox cloud before you opened it in Dorico?
No; other than opening the file in Dorico, I don’t know how I would have noticed that.
By checking file modification in the Dropbox app or Files app.
I found the reason behind this in Dorico for iPad 2.2 release notes:
Note that not all cloud storage apps on your iPad may support Open in Place: for example, while iCloud Drive and Dropbox do, Microsoft OneDrive does not. If you open a project from an app that does not support Open in Place, then just as in previous versions of Dorico for iPad, the project will be copied into Dorico’s own local storage, and you will have to manually share the updated version back out again. Dorico will warn you when you are opening a project from a location that does not support Open in Place.
Open in place does work with OneDrive now, but some other providers still may not support it.