This minor NarraFirma release adds bulk export of graphs and statistics. It also fixes a few bugs.

Graphs without catalysis

On the “Explore patterns” page, you can now export all of the graphs and/or statistics for all of the patterns in the list, even if you have not written any observations for them. This is for situations in which you want to use NF to generate graphs and statistics, but you don’t want to use it to build catalytic material. Or you want to show someone the graphs you have found before you start writing your observations.

I also fixed a few small bugs, as usual, including a bug that might have been slowing down the “Explore patterns” page for you.

As always, if you find any bugs – or find anything in NF confusing or hard to use – please tell me on the GitHub issues page.

This minor NarraFirma release makes a few small quality-of-life improvements and fixes a few bugs.

Print your catalysis report in bits and pieces

On the “Print catalysis report” page, you can now save a CSV (spreadsheet) file with just the observations and interpretations you wrote, for pasting into whatever software you want to use to prepare your catalytic material. Paired with the option to spit out just the graphs associated with your observations, this should make creating your catalysis materials even easier.

Note that this new bits-and-pieces option ignores any clustering you do inside of NF. You might or might not care about that.

If you would like to write your catalysis reports in NF (perhaps to use its clustering interface), I recommend that you give pandoc a try. It works like a charm to convert NF’s HTML reports into any format you like.

Just-in-time help

When you’re looking at graphs in NF, it is not immediately obvious that you should click and drag on them to select stories. So I added a little bit of text below the graphs on the “Spot-check graphs” and “Explore patterns” pages to let you know that you can do that.

Another thing that happens sometimes when you are working with patterns on the “Explore patterns” page is that you forget the longer version of a question on the graph. So now, in the “Things you can do” list under each graph, there is an option called “Show survey questions for this pattern.” If you choose that option, then click “Do it,” NF will pop up a dialog that gives you the full text of the question, along with its (non-lumped) answers.

I also fixed a few little bugs.

As always, if you find any bugs – or find anything in NF confusing or hard to use – please tell me on the GitHub issues page.

This minor but essential NarraFirma release fixes three categories of bugs.

No new story collections!

In the last update (v1.6.0) I introduced a show-stopper of a bug that meant you couldn’t create the first story collection in a project. Sorry, that was sloppy of me. I tested the new dialog in a project that already had story collections in it, and I forgot to think of the new-project situation. It is fixed now.

Multiplayer bugs!

We recently had the opportunity to have a whole bunch of people use NF at the same time. A whole bunch of updating bugs popped up. It was frustrating! But so very useful. I would like to apologize to the users who encountered these bugs, and to thank them for their patience and understanding.

The worst of the bugs came about due to a misunderstanding of how mithril handles screen updates during user editing.

There is a critical assumption in the version of mithril we are currently using in NF (0.2.0). When a mithril element gets a redraw message, it redraws itself using its value function, which draws data from the datastore. The current value of the text box (that is, whatever you were typing) is overwritten by the datastore value.

If you are using the oninput method to save changes to the datastore, this is not a problem, because the oninput method fires on every keystroke. So every character you type is immediately saved to the datastore, and differences don’t pile up.

However, we didn’t want to use the oninput method in NarraFirma text boxes. Saving to the server database on every keystroke would multiply the number of messages so much that the NF server would slow to a crawl. Plus, NF databases would be orders of magnitude bigger. So we decided to use the onchange method, which only fires when you leave the field or hit Enter. This is why, when you are typing into a text box in NF, you have to hit Enter or Tab, or click outside the box, to save what you have typed to the server.

We have always been using the value function to set an element’s displayed text. But in a multi-user situation, the value function might be called by an update message while the user is in the middle of editing a text box. In our session last week, people were having texts disappear in front of their eyes.

This was a complete shock to us, because we should have seen it before. We have tested the multi-user aspect of NF many times over the years. But I think we never typed a lot of text into a field, over a long period of time. So we never saw these interruptions happening. When you are typing “test123” into text fields over and over, you never get a chance to see what happens when you spend a whole minute puzzling over what you are going to write there.

Actually, one user did tell me that they were seeing multi-user collision bugs four years ago. I assumed that they were talking about two people working on the same field at the same time. So I set up a conflict-handling system to handle that situation. It worked! But only for that one situation. There must have been other conflicts that I continued to not see, probably because I continued to test by typing in things like “test123.” That user never told me about any more multi-user conflicts, so I thought the problem was fixed. But looking back, maybe what actually happened was that they finished their project and stopped setting up the long-edit conditions under which the other bug was showing itself.

This onchange-overwrite problem was discussed on the mithril Github issues list way back in 2016. The mithril user in that discussion, like us, was using the onchange method in a situation in which updates were coming in from elsewhere. Their workaround was to use the config function to “keep a separate ‘work-in-progress’ state property and another ‘real’ property on the side.” That was a great idea. We implemented it (just now, mind you, not eight years ago) and it works.

Some readers of this blog will be surprised to hear that we are still using mithril 0.2.0, which came out several years ago. The thing is, we need to set aside a nice big chunk of time to make all of the careful changes required to upgrade our mithril version to the current version (2.2.2). It sounds like mithril is much nicer now, and we are eager to do this, but we just never have that much time free. Hopefully we will find a way to get to it someday. In the meantime, mithril 0.2.0 still works fine, except for this one problem, which is now fixed. (The config function goes away in later mithril versions, so we will have to change how we do text-box updates during that refactoring.)

We did see some other updating bugs in our multi-user session. They were all failures to update various screen widgets when new data came in (like when you were annotating stories and another user added a new answer for an annotation question). Those are fixed now too.

Invisible mismatches!

Another new bug came up recently. A user had entered answers for a fixed-list question, and (probably without noticing) had included extra white-space characters (spaces and tab characters) in the answers. (This was probably from pasting the answers in from somewhere else.)

NF doesn’t care if you have a lot of extra crap in your answers – or at least I thought it didn’t. In reality, there was a hidden assumption in the filtering and display lumping features of NF. To use those facilities, you enter a bunch of answer names, and NF parses the text you enter, trimming white-space characters as it goes.

Do you see the problem? The answers you specify in the filter or lumping command cannot match answers that have extra spaces in them.

So, after some thought, I fixed the problem on both sides. NF now trims out whitespace characters when it compares data during the filtering and display-lumping processes (that’s for legacy data). And it will no longer allow you to enter fixed-list answers with leading or trailing white-space characters.

The new restriction on white-space characters could affect your legacy data.

• If you have a choice question that has leading or trailing white-space characters in its answers,
• and it is connected to a story form that is used in a story collection that has stories in it,
• and you change the list of answers for the question, NF will force you to remove the extra characters.
• Then, if you update the story form in the collection, the answers that are saved in your stories may no longer match your new trimmed answers.

I think this sequence of events is unlikely to happen to anybody, because probably few people have leading or trailing white-space characters in their answer lists. But if this does happen to you, you can fix the mismatch.

1. Export your stories to a CSV file.
2. Use a spreadsheet or text editor to remove the extra characters (in the answers to that question only) via search-and-replace.
3. Import the stories into a new story collection, using the updated story form.

If you run into this problem and have trouble solving it, feel free to ask me for help (cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com). I may need to ask you to send me your project so I can fix the data for you. (I always delete projects again as soon as I have fixed them.)

I would like to say a big thank you to the users who told me about (and had to deal with) these bugs. As always, if you find any bugs, please tell me on the GitHub issues page.

This major NarraFirma release improves the interface and the surveying system.

No more “Please click the Close button” popups

In version 1.5.18 of NarraFirma, I added something annoying to the interface. When you had entry fields open in an editing panel (under a list), and you clicked on one of the navigation buttons or links at the top of the page, NF would ask you to click the Close button so it could validate your open fields. I did this because several NF users had run into problems due to missing but necessary data (like an empty “short name” identifier for a question).

I didn’t like adding that popup, and I didn’t like clicking it either. But I didn’t know how else I could help people avoid having problems with missing data.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to think of another way to handle validation on page changes. In this version I finally figured it out. Now, when you click one of the navigation buttons or links at the top of the page, NF pretends that you clicked the Close button (and runs the data-validation checks it would run if you clicked it). That’s better.

[By the way, one of our biggest mistakes in designing NarraFirma is that many of the objects in the system (questions, forms, answers) are connected by their (user-entered) names, which cannot be changed without making a mess. For example, answers to choice questions are stored in each story as answers to questions. That was a huge mistake. Each stored answer should have been a UUID, not the text of the answer. If we had done that, users would have been able to change the texts of answers without breaking connections. In retrospect, every single reference should have been a UUID. (Some are! But most aren’t.) We would like to fix this. But we will have to step very carefully to avoid breaking any existing data. It is on the wish list, and I think it will happen eventually, if we are able to keep working on the software.]

Data conflict protection

NarraFirma keeps its stories in story collections: containers for stories. Each story collection is associated with a story form (or questionnaire or survey) that determines how the stories in the collection are to be gathered or entered into the system.

When you create a story collection, NF copies a “snapshot” version of the selected story form into the story collection. It needs to do this because, for security purposes, the surveying part of NarraFirma is an entirely separate program. It knows nothing (well, nothing else) about your project.

In our very first version of NF, there was no way to change the snapshot form once it was copied. It was  unalterable. But we soon realized that it is sometimes necessary to make small changes to a story form after some stories are collected – to fix typographical errors, for example, or to add explanations of commonly misunderstood questions. So we added an “Update Story Form” button – and a warning to use it only to make changes to the form’s appearance, not to the structure of its data.

Over the years I have seen a gamut of responses to that button and its warning. Some people have been afraid to use it to fix even the tiniest of typographical mistakes. Others have happily clicked the Update button after making major changes to the types of data the story form collects.

To fix both of these problems, I have now added a data-conflict checking system. When you click the Update Story Form button, NF now looks to see if you have any data that will be invalidated by the differences between the snapshot and current versions of the form. It tells you what it found, and it stops you from updating the form if you will lose data by doing it – unless you override its decision and tell it to update the form anyway. (The stories that will lose data could be test stories, after all.)

You can also check for data conflicts before you click the dreaded Update button, just in case anyone is still worried about using it. I have also improved the help-page explanation of what you can and cannot change in a story form after you have begun collecting stories.

Duplication

When we first thought about improving the link between story forms and story collections, we thought it might be best to “lock” any story form that was actively linked to a story collection (so you couldn’t mess with it). If we did that, we thought, users would need a way to copy a locked story form and change the copy. So we needed a cloning system.

The table widget in NarraFirma once had a “Duplicate” button, but it was a prototype button that we never finished implementing. So we recreated the button and made it work. Since it’s on a standard widget, it works for everything, not just for story forms.

But then, after doing that, we realized that locking the story form without locking its questions would not protect story data very well. You could still invalidate your data by changing a question to an incompatible type. And if it would be messy to have locked story forms, it would really messy to have locked questions as well. So we backed out of the whole locking idea and instead developed the reporting idea I described above.

But the duplication button is nice, so we kept it. Everything in NarraFirma can now be cloned.

Spot-checking multiple story collections

Here’s another bit of residue left over from the let’s-lock-story-forms idea. We were thinking that asking users to create lots of locked story collections would make the “Spot-check graphs” page less useful, because they would have to check each collection separately. So I wrote myself a sticky note to change that page so it could merge data from multiple collections.

After we abandoned the locked-story-form idea, I looked at the sticky note and thought, eh, that was still a good idea. So I did it anyway. Now, instead of a drop-down list of collections to choose from, you get a bunch of checkboxes, and NF shows the stories in the selected collections all mixed together, as if they were in one giant collection. That’s how catalysis works, so now this page works that way too.

Better story cards

I am ashamed to say that I have been meaning to add multi-column story cards for ages but never got around to it. It didn’t take that long. I should have done it years ago. Sorry about that.

Now, when you print your story cards, you can specify how many columns to put them in. Since the scale values are in embedded tables, this can look messy if you choose more than two columns; so I added another option to set how many characters are used to draw each scale (from 20 to 100).

I’ve tested a copy-and-paste workflow from the generated HTML to Microsoft Word and LibreOffice, creating story cards you can cut apart (with a paper cutter) to make more card-like objects for people to work/play with during sensemaking. (I added a description of these workflows to the help page for the “Print story cards” page.) You can also use the excellent pandoc utility to convert your story-card file to the format you want to use.

Bug fixes

Finally, I fixed a few little bugs.

1. If your story collection name had a special character in it (like an accent), the URL on the “Start story collection” page was not clickable (though it was copy-and-pastable). That’s fixed now.
2. A helpful user pointed out what was probably a long-standing but never-noticed bug. In the survey form, if the user told more than one story, any radio-button selection above the last story disappeared, even though the data was stored properly. That is now fixed.

I would like to say a big thank you to the users who told me about bugs and about things they found confusing or hard to use. As always, if you find any bugs – or if you find anything in NF confusing or hard to use – please tell me on the GitHub issues page.