Configuration Panel - problem with sorting sync jobs

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Posts: 7
Joined: 1 Jan 2014

Pako

Happy New Year, everyone!

Just before New Year I updated FFS from 5.4 to 6.0, and today my users were waiting in for me with shotguns :(

The problem:
After using and closing FFS, on next start it will reorder the sync jobs so that on the top (above entry "last session") will be listed all the jobs you used during the previous session. This is true only for sync job names starting with numbers. If you used sync job named TOOLS, it will not show on the top of the list on the next start of FFS.

I know, it is hard to describe, so look at the image below. The numbered views -1- through -4- represent the configuration panel status after steps which I am going to outline:

-1- Freshly loaded sync jobs on new installation of FFS. Afterwards, I run sync jobs TOOLS, AUTOCAD LIBRARY, and "1401-21C Museum Hotel". Then I close FFS.

-2- This is just opened FFS after closing it in step -1-. As you can see, the last job "1401-21C Museum Hotel" is at the top, but not the other two jobs that I ran in step -1-. Now I run "1312-UNCH 27 BED", "1313-Syngenta", and "1315-DROF" and again close FFS.

-3- Just opened FFS after closing it in step -2-. The jobs I ran in previous session are now at the top of the list plus the job that was automatically highlighted during opening FFS (1401-21C Museum Hotel). Now "1312-UNCH 27 BED" was automatically highlighted after opening FFS. I ran only job "1311-Johnson Medical Center" and closed FFS.

-4- Starting FFS again. As expected, only "1311-Johnson Medical Center" and "1312-UNCH 27 BED" are at the top of the list now.

SF is cutting the RHS of the image, so you can see the full image here:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/PachoShared/images/FFS-config-problem.png

Image

BTW, just selecting a sync job is sufficient to reproduce this behavior, it's not needed to actually run the sync.

While I can see reasoning in the decision for this sorting behavior, it is extremely inconvenient for people having 25-30 sync jobs loaded and running 3-4 of them per day. They have come with naming convention so that it will be easy to search within the list of sync jobs, and they heavily rely on consistency in this list. Few people even called me to ask why their sync jobs are disappearing because they didn't even look at the top of the list, they just saw a missing sync-job at the bottom where they had it seen an hour ago during previous run of FFS.

And now my questions - am I missing some setting allowing me to choose sorting behavior? If not, is it possible to have the Configuration Panel sorting behavior as an option somewhere (e.g. GlobalSettings.xml) ... or, are you willing to revert the sorting to the way it was before, alphabetically?
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Site Admin
Posts: 7052
Joined: 9 Dec 2007

Zenju

Thanks Pako for the detailed report! This behavior is in fact not intended but a bug. The list is supposed to be sorted alphabetically with the exception of `<last session>`.
Lexicographically this entry comes after "1" and before "A". The bug lies in the exception for `<last session>` that makes sure it is always at the first position. Here is the fixed version for testing:

[404, Invalid URL: http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/FreeFileSync_6.2_beta_Windows_Setup.exe]
Posts: 7
Joined: 1 Jan 2014

Pako

Zenju, I have always been impressed by your response rate on support questions, and yet again, you delivered. Thank you! The fixed version indeed works beautifully!