This minor NarraFirma release fixes one small bug that applies only to older projects.
Too many remarkable patterns
A helpful user told us about a strange problem. On the “Explore patterns” page of NF, when they double-clicked on a pattern, NF was setting the “remarkable” flag of that pattern to “yes” – on its own – and they could not set it back again.
What caused the problem was a bit of code we wrote to update legacy data back in 2019. It was supposed to add a “remarkable” flag to any pattern that had at least one observation but no “remarkable” flag. That’s because, prior to version 1.4.0 of NF, there was no remarkable flag.
The problem was that this update was creating a circular interaction because it was (accidentally) being done while the page was being redrawn. Changing the data caused the page to redraw, which changed the data, causing the page to redraw, and so on. Double-clicking was not the only way to get the cycle going; it could also happen by clicking the arrows under the table. But double-clicking made the cycle more visible, which is probably why we never noticed it before. (Double-clicking has no actual meaning in NarraFirma, so we’ve never done it.)
To fix the problem, we changed the code so the updating only happens when the user changes the “remarkable” flag by hand. This does mean that people who have legacy data (created before NF 1.4.0) will have to manually update their remarkable flags. But that is probably few people at this point, and now it won’t happen “on its own.”
Thank you, user! And 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.