Support for incremental updates to Decks in Google Drive

Support for incremental updates to Decks in Google Drive

Postby Guest » Wed Oct 09, 2019 10:38 pm

This is a feature request. It'd be great if decks imported from Google drive could be updated incrementally. I use spaced repetition to aid my learning process. But if I add new rows to a spreadsheet (I'm in a German class right now and we get new vocabulary daily) and then reimport it, it's a brand new deck. It'd be great if the app could understand it's the same deck (just by the name of the Spreadsheet would be fine) and diff the local rows on the device against the rows in Google Drive and add new rows (and preferably remove old ones, e.g. when I realize I have a spelling or translation mistake and modify a row). Is such a thing possible? If the code's on github or another open-source site, I'm happy to contribute such functionality.

Thanks

Jeff
Guest
 

Re: Support for incremental updates to Decks in Google Drive

Postby Ernie » Sat Oct 12, 2019 3:26 am

Hi Jeff,

Sorry for slow response.

Instead of adding a new deck, update an existing one:

Tap "Edit", then tap deck. Notice the "Deck Code". It will start with "G:" for Google Drive sources, and then be the name of the Drive file.
Tap "Download/Update". This will download the latest data from Drive (based on Deck Code).
All existing cards will be deleted and the new cards installed. BUT, the app will try to match up old and new cards so that it can copy statistics from old to new cards (so you don't lose your statistics). It does this by looking for unique matches between old and new cards either by Text 1, Text 2 or Text 1 + Text 2. If you change both Text 1 and Text 2 at the same time for an existing card, statistics will be lost.

Hopefully this will solve your problem.
Ernie
Ernie
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5007
Joined: Fri Oct 01, 2010 6:12 pm
Location: San Francisco / Taiwan

Re: Support for incremental updates to Decks in Google Drive

Postby cokvhecv » Sun Dec 01, 2019 4:53 pm

HI Ernie -

I had a problem doing just what you said, i.e.
1 - I exported my Deck (1617 entries) - Mvskoke_FlashcardsDeluxe1.xlsx (via OneDrive)
2 - I merged , updated some cards (particularly Categories) & added + 197 entries (incl some long phrases w Media mp4 files)
3 - saved updated/merged file (w/o stats) in Mvskoke_FlashcardsDeluxe1.xlsx
4 - set Deck Code to = G:.... & loaded to Google Drive
5 - on the App on my iPhone, selected Edit > Download/Update per instructions
6 - upload completed but result is that it did NOT "match up old and new cards so that it can copy statistics ", instead
- I now have 3431 cards in the deck
-- 3234 duplicates = the orignal 1617 items x2 , they are all in there 2x
-- the 197 NEW entries - no duplicates for these, they're just in there 1x each
7 - I re-exported the resulting file from my iPhone, and in there each duplicated entry has :
-- for the 1st entry listed
------ Category1/2/3 = BLANK (for the entries updated in merge / update file, that weren't already populated)
------Statistics 1 = populated
-- for the 2nd (duplicate) entry
------ Category1/2/3 = Updated / populated per the update file
------Statistics 1 = Blank/NULL
_________________________________________________
Apparently the Match failed everywhere .....

I suppose now I could just recover my stats from the latest export, merge these in to my upload file & then load it as if it were a new deck , rather than trying to merge & count on the App retaining the stats for the updated items,
but that is kind of a pain when the App is supposed to let you run an update...
I did successfully do this a few months back (Apr or May?) & it worked fine merge-wise, but for some reason this time it just went askew creating 1600+ duplicates.

Do you have any other suggestions or diagnosis for why it did this ?

I did add some grammatical markers, including a couple of numeric items in the Text1 field ( number 3 for ex.), is this why it had a problem, or something else.
I'd like to continue using this merge feature, but I'd like to know if I can't rely on it...

Thoughts/Suggestions ?

thanks/Randy
cokvhecv
 
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Nov 13, 2018 10:28 am

Re: Support for incremental updates to Decks in Google Drive

Postby Ernie » Mon Dec 02, 2019 9:24 pm

Hi Randy,

After you tap "Download/Update" you'll be in the "Decks to Update" screen. Tap the gear icon at top-right. Notice the "Append" option. This should be off by default. If it got turned on through some glitch, I'm sorry. I guessing this was on to create duplicate cards.

At this point, matching isn't going to work well because of the duplicate cards. The matching process needs unique matches between old and new cards to work.

As far as how to best cleanup... How about...
1) Put your old deck back. You can probably do this exporting with statistics and deleting the new rows at the bottom, then adding back as a new deck.
2) Replace your cloud version with your new cards and run"download/update", but with Append turned off
The above I think is what you wanted to do originally. Does that work?

Keep in mind that if you change the text on both side 1 and side 2, you'll looks statistics. If you know you are making big changes, you can export with statistics, make updates, then restore and use the statistics from the cloud version.
Ernie
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5007
Joined: Fri Oct 01, 2010 6:12 pm
Location: San Francisco / Taiwan

Re: Support for incremental updates to Decks in Google Drive

Postby cokvhecv » Sun Dec 08, 2019 8:44 am

Thanks, Ernie, I think this was it, missing the status of the "Append" Option
In the meantime, I actually took the Saved version (which luckily included stats) , copied it to local, opened in Excel & re-merged my new items into this exported baseline w/ stats
Then, I had to add back the header section with Deck Stats.
In the past I've done the merging in an Excel Table with column headings on Row1 , i.e. excluding deck stats (mainly so I can access dropdowns to add categories on new entries)
Merge worked in the past with that format, but in this case I had to load the full deck stats & all as a new deck & then delete the one that got all those duplicates.
This worked & I just hadn't checked the forum, so thanks for your head's up on Append, I'll need to do another merge again before too long, so the Append thing will come in handy soon enough.
cokvhecv
 
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Nov 13, 2018 10:28 am

Return to Comments, Questions and Feedback