Abandoned Layouts

[sonicjunki]

On the subject of users and layouts. Would be nice when a user is deleted if the app would delete all that users layouts. Playing in a cover band where people come and go the amount of abandoned layouts can get pretty messy.

[arlo]

Identifying an "abandoned" layout is tricky because layouts can be used by just one user or shared by multiple users. But I have a few ideas that might work for that and will put it on my to do list.

[sonicjunki]

Thank you sir!

[arlo]

I thought through some ideas for this, but none seem very useful. I'm wondering if it might be better to change the default user assignment to just the current user. Layouts are created whenever a user logs in from a device size that hasn't been used in the account before. Then those layouts are assigned to all users, so if someone later logs in with another device of the same size, the layouts are already available and there's no need to create more.

If I changed that, there would actually be more layouts created, but not many more because there are so many different sizes of phones and tablets out there now that the chance of multiple bandmates having the same size of device is lower than it used to be. As a trade-off for the additional layouts, most layouts would only be assigned to a single user, so then it would be easier to know which ones are no longer needed.

With this approach, multiple users could still share the same layout if they explicitly changed the user assignments, that just wouldn't be the default. A beneficial side effect of the change is that we wouldn't have to worry about a user inadvertently customizing a layout in a way that confuses other users with the same device size.

I welcome any feedback on this.

[pheldal]

What about a timestamp updated when a layout is opened for use. Would make it easier to filter the ones that potentially may be deleted, or even enable auto-delete after 6-12 months or so. Yet another possibility is to differentiate layouts that are manually created vs the set that are automatically created (or from the tools menu) for a device. Auto-generated layout not use for a while should be fairly safe to remove.

[arlo]

I don't think a timestamp would be very useful because it wouldn't tell us if a layout was viewed once recently or is used regularly; it also doesn't account for a layout that hasn't been used for a while but is still wanted.

I also don't think any kind of auto-deletion would be a good idea. I think that would create bigger problems than the problem we're trying to solve.

[Neill00]

I have noticed that a lot of layouts created by various users in my band have the USERS parameter set to ALL and in testing this seems to be the default setting that is filled in when creating a new layout. Maybe it would be better if BandHelper just pre-filled the user who is creating the layout.  If I want to make a layout available to my band-mates , I can add them manually at any time. Then if there was a parameter in settings that would allow to turn on or off the ability to see layouts created by other members (maybe ONLY VIEW MY LAYOUTS) it would make it more tidy for us and make it easier for each user to do their own house-keeping in deleting layouts they no longer use without affecting other users.


*** I redid this post as it got messed up the first attempt when I tried to use quotation marks or apostrophes***
 

[arlo]

Starting with today's release, when a user logs in from a device for the first time, layouts will be created for that device size that are assigned only to that user. And the Repertoire > Layouts list on the website now shows which users each layout is assigned to. So for new accounts moving forward, this should make it pretty easy to remove layouts that are only associated with a particular user.

For existing accounts that already have layouts shared by multiple users, you would have to do some cleanup to get to the behavior of a new account. The Repertoire > Layouts list shows the screen size each layout was created for, and if you hover over that it shows the name of the device it was created from, so in many cases you can use this info to figure out whose device a layout is for and assign the layout only to that user. If multiple users have the same device size, you would have to assign the layout to one of the users and ask the others to click Help > Utilities > Load Standard Layouts to create additional layouts assigned only to them. However, you should check to see if those layouts have been customized first, because then the new layouts would need to have the same customizations applied. At that point it might be easier just to keep the shared layouts. You could at least reduce their user assignments to only the users with that device size.

Layouts can still be shared by multiple users by changing the Users field for a layout, but that is no longer the default.

As a side benefit to this change, users with Added Data editing access will always be able to edit their own layouts, because they will always get a new set of layouts owned by them when they log in for the first time from each of their devices.