While it’s great, I think, to be able to have multiple views of the same document open, it was not entirely obvious to me that each window is another instance, so that for instance if I have a DT window open in Vertical Split mode, and am editing a document, then double click on it to give it its own window, I have now bifurcated the data, so that if I make one change in one window, the other view will not update, and in fact I can go ahead and make a different change in a different window, creating two different “Dirty” states for the document. Whichever view gets saved first will overwrite the other. This make DT feel less like a database – where you can have multiple views of the same data – and more like a crufty old file system, where data is held in RAM and manually written back to a singly existant data file. This is a bit troubling…
A database is a file system is a database. Anyway, it’s a UI issue which will be hopefully improved in V2.
I haven’t checked the latest version of FileMaker, but I remember having to caution people in my office about a similar UI issue in FileMaker. It was possible to display two views of the same data field, type different changes in each without updating the other – and the edit that was saved “overwrote” the unsaved edit in the other view.
You can see the similar behavior in an Excel spreadsheet where the content of a cell is displayed in multiple locations. Click in the original cell and type a change. The ‘alias’ cells don’t change until one hits the Tab or Return key to save the change in the original cell.
Workaround: Confine editing to only one view of a document at a time, then hit Command-S to save it.