Publisher Modified Status not working right

[Gobo]

Hello folks,

We're seeing some strange (I believe) behavior. We have a Publisher file on a shared google drive and access it from various computers. If we go the Resource Manager and update links to Aphoto files on one computer so that they all say OK, I would expect to see the same status when opening that file from the other computers. However, the other computers still show Modified (and so are blurred and need updated) on those linked Aphoto files. 

That doesn't make sense to me. There shouldn't be any local computer status difference when we're all accessing the same shared file.

So if my assistant updates the links, I should be able to open that same file and see that the links have been updated. Right now, I have to go in on my machine and update all the links again so there are no blurred pages on my computer. 

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Will

[Ron P.]

According to the Online Help Files for Resource Manger, you're correct, Provided you have Automatically update Linked Resources when modified externally checked the Preferences>General tab.

However there's numerous posts regarding using files stored on drives other than local hard drives. It is at least partially due to how the Affinity apps function. They do not load the complete document/data into memory at once. They designed it this way for better performance, ie; speed? So, if there's a stutter, hiccup in the communication with the external drive, be it a USB external, or cloud, then it can cause problems, up to file corruption.

I may be (and problem am) wrong here, but given the way the apps are designed, even though it's told to auto-update when modified externally, I don't see how that can be when the apps partially load the data. It would take telling it to update. I further think for this to work smoother, it would take removing security protections, such as firewalls, and anti-virus, so nothing stands in the way of the apps communications.

Just my thought on what may be the issue.. 🤔

[walt.farrell]

It is likely that user A accessing a file on Google Drive will have a different absolute path name for the file (and items it contains) than user B accessing the same file. And when that happens, I think you will see the result you describe, @Gobo.

V2 has started to make some enhancements to avoid this, but only for Dropbox. You can specify via Preferences/Settings that the Dropbox service should be Linked, and that will avoid this similar problem. But it's only for Dropbox (and automatically, for iCloud) at this point, not for Google Drive.

[Gobo]

I wasn't aware of the option you mentioned, Ron. That fixed it. Thanks folks!