Gdevelop: Missing 'unsaved changes will be lost' confirmation popup

[BWPanda]

Describe the bug

When you have a game open in GD and go to File > Close project, you get a confirmation popup stating that unsaved changes will be lost.

However, if you have a game open and go to File > Open, or File > Create a new project, and proceed through the various popups to open or create a game, you never get the same confirmation popup regarding unsaved changes being lost. This could result in data loss...

[Bouh]

For prevent this can we see if the project as be saved before (what function can we use ?) ?
If the project is already saved we display nothing, and if save is not we alert the user ?

[BWPanda]

That would be ideal in all situations (creating a new project, opening an existing project and closing the current project).

[4ian]

For prevent this can we see if the project as be saved before (what function can we use ?) ?
If the project is already saved we display nothing, and if save is not we alert the user ?

That's the ideal solution.
There is no magic function to do it. Any change has to be saved in a flag "isDirty" in the editor to indicate that the project has some changes that are pending save.

[Kalovelo]

The simplest workaround would be to alert the user when he clicks on "Create a new project" (like it happens with "Close project") but that wouldn't be ideal nor long-term solution 🤔

Towards the ideal one, I would suggest implementing a more abstract/global state management between SceneEditor and the rest of the components (ElectronMainMenu for example) so we can have a unsavedChanges state. A tool for that would be Redux and even if I see it as a package dependency, I am not able to find any used instance of it, therefore I do not know if Redux is a desired solution for the Editor.

@4ian What do you think? I could start working on it, setting up a redux store and a "first form" of unsaved changes checking.

[4ian]

The simplest workaround would be to alert the user when he clicks on "Create a new project" (like it happens with "Close project") but that wouldn't be ideal nor long-term solution 🤔

I think that would actually be a perfectly ideal long term solution for reducing the risk of people create new project/opening another one and losing their changes. :)

@4ian What do you think? I could start working on it, setting up a redux store and a "first form" of unsaved changes checking.

For the ideal solution, I'm all for doing the work of adding a dirty bit to the project or some state in the React components.

But I don't want to introduce Redux or a global state management in GDevelop. Mainly because as the name implies they are "global" - and nothing in GDevelop must be global. Any component must be able to work by itself - without relying on a store - just by having the proper props being passed. This is a very explicit approach and make navigating in the codebase as easy as looking at the props and searching for component names.

You may argue "sure, but a function to set a dirty flag to true will be used a lot, we should be able to avoid passing it as a prop everywhere". In this exceptional case, it's true that it would be a pain in which case we can use... React contexts :) They are great at doing exactly this: making something accessible without having to pass a prop everywhere - but still be explicit when you need it.

So in short: the ideal solution would be a dirty flag that is set whenever anything is changed - which can be provided thanks to a React context. Probably MainFrame should be responsible for this.

[Kalovelo]

Thank you for your comments!
I will check it out and work on submitting the ideal solution.