Skye, If I'm wrong I hope someone will correct me.
What you describe is more like a database with discreet record locking. A TWs behaves similarly to a database in some ways but tiddler-locking is not its normal behavior. Because the TW is a single file, the entire TW is written during a save operation. The only way to save parts of a TW would be to break it into multiple files and only save the core and whatever tiddlers have been modified (dirty). Take a look at Jack Parke's ArchivePlugin (http:// jackparke.googlepages.com/jtw.html#ArchivePlugin). I use it to externalize large tiddlers and tidders common across multiple TWs (like your post about converting HTML pages to tiddlers and my suggestion to externalize common CSS to leverage content reuse and insure consistency among the TWs sharing the tiddlers). Image a TW with two (2) content tiddlers: the entire text of "War and Peace" in one and the text "Hello world" in the other. Editing either then saving the TW take about the same amount of time to save. Because "War and Peace" is very large, the TW would be very large: saving and loading would be time consuming. Now image using ArchivePlugin to externalize those two (2) tiddlers. Loading the TW (three files: the core plus two tiddlers) will take almost exactly the same amount of time as it would for the TW with the tiddlers internal (everything loads at start-up). But saving would be very quick when editing the "Hello world" tiddler or adding new, reasonably-sized tiddlers, because the save process won't include the "War and Peace" tiddler if it hasn't changed. One caveat, though. Multiple TWs can "own" the same tiddler via ArchivePlugin. But without some extra system-level file management, e.g. version control software or some other file-locking mechanism, when two (2) TWs are opened which contain a common tiddler and that common tiddler is modified and saved by one TW, the other TW will not be aware of the changes. Without file locking, the second TW will be able to overwrite the modifications made by the first TW. Proceed with extreme caution. What might mitigate the potential collisions would be a messaging system within the TWs, kind of like RSS, that would broadcast "changes have taken place here", listen for "have any changes taken place anywhere" messages, and offer to refresh revised tiddlers. But now we're wading into the deep end of the server-side TW pool, where much interesting developing is currently underway. Hope this doesn't muddy the water. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en.
