I'm hoping third time is lucky, because I have a hard time imagining
absolutely no-one on this list would have any light to shed on this
matter. (Not that anybody _has_ to of course, even if they do :-)
But maybe I have not been very successful at presenting the
situation in a clear manner.
So, the issue is: in the project I'm working on saving a file to
disk can be a particularly lengthy operation. If I save a document's
state to disk using the usual methods this can, even on the latest
hardware, result in an unresponsive app with a spinning beach-ball
for an extended period of time (many seconds, minutes even if the
files are very large).
I need to therefore write out the document in a separate thread. To
bloc changes to the document at hand, and provide feedback, a modal
sheet is presented that reflects the saving progress, but leaves the
runloop free to respond to user actions thus maintaining a healthy
feel to the app and allowing the user to work on other documents.
I have no problems saving the file. That all happens correctly. The
problem is that after the file is saved and worked on some more,
then, when trying to write the modifications out to disk NSDocument
(I suppose) complains that the file has been modified by another
application.
I think the reason for this is: The initial part of the saving
process is done through the usual channels provided by NSDocument:
If the document is untitled a Save Panel appears, if not the routine
to write out the data is called straight away. This is where I fork
a thread that does the actual saving. However: after forking the
thread the method returns immediately and, *I suppose*, the
framework's saving mechanism at that point believes a successful
save operation has completed and records some state info about the
doc's on disk representation (like time of saving). Then when a new
save command is issued by the user the document checks its on disk
representation state and compares it to its internal data and
discovers that the last modification has a later date the one stored
in memory. So the doc must have been changed by another app and the
user is alerted. [This is conjecture on my part, but seems to me the
most likely scenario.]
What I need then is a way to synchronise the internally recorded
state info with the on disk representation after I am done writing
out the data. Is there a way to do this? Or do I need to take the
whole process into my own hands right from the start, bypassing the
NSDocument's saving services altogether? I'd rather not, if I don't
really have to.
I hope this makes cear what is going on, and some help, any
pointers, on this matter would be really appreciated.
I don't know if it may solve your problem, but have a look at "Message
Flow in the Document Architecture"
