Concurrent Editing and Merging Changes - what do you mean by manually merge? how is merging done?

[Open Europa Wikis Team]

Dear Confluence community.

We are using Confluence 6.4.1.

Sometimes, users edit the same page and same paragraph at the same time; this generates a conflict.

The first user saving - let's call her Alice - has his modifications saved.

However, the second user - let's call him Bob - trying to save has a page refresh notifying the page cannot be saved because of a conflict. See https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf64/concurrent-editing-and-merging-changes-936510651.html

The conflicting paragraph is shown.

The options offered are:

• Overwrite: save and overwrite changes of the first user
• Cancel: keep changes of the first user, discard changes of the second user

According to https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf64/concurrent-editing-and-merging-changes-936510651.html :

>> Continue editing - Continue to edit the page; useful if you want to manually merge the changes.

>> If Bob's changes overlap with Alice's, Confluence will display an error message to Bob showing where Alice has changed the page, and giving Bob the options to overwrite Alice's changes with his own, to re-edit the document to incorporate Alice's work, or to cancel his own changes entirely, maintaining Alice's changes.

How is the manual merge supposed to work?

• Is it supposed to have a visual diff tool somewhere to see the changes and merge them (something similar to Meld or WinMerge but within the wiki page editor)
• Is it supposed to be copied / pasted from the warning message by Bob to the wiki page editor?

Please find below a screenshot of the warning message we have and the options proposed.

Thank you a lot for your help.

Best regards,

Alexandre - DIGIT WEBTOOLS team

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello there Alexandre! Thanks for sharing with us.

The options are as follow:

1. Overwrite the content
2. Cancel the current edit
3. Manually include the rest of the content on your edit

The diff is shown right above the editor toolbar. There, you can check what will be removed and what will be inserted if you proceed to publish the page with your own changes.

The user can manually insert the other user's content on their own edit so when the page is published, everything is present.

To avoid this, you could try to enable Collaborative Editing:

Collaborative Editing

This feature allows real-time editing with multiple users on the same page.

Let us know your thoughts!

[Open Europa Wikis Team]

Dear Diego,

Thank you for your answer, that's very clear.

So now I'm a 100% sure the merge has to be done manually, copy / pasting / adapting manually in the editor from the diff shown above the editor toolbar.

I had the secret hope there would be an option and buttons to Accept / Reject changes, like it's the case in diff / track changes tool, but it's not the case.

As of the Collaborative Editing mode, we had to turn it off temporarily because of corruption when saving data.

Anyway, I accept your answer.

Thanks again.

Best regards.

Alexandre - DIGIT WEBTOOLS

[Open Europa Wikis Team]

Actually, this is because of this issue we had to disable the collaborative editing mode: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-51998 (we are using Confluence 6.4.1)

[serge calderara]

@Open Europa Wikis Team , did you manage to get your issue solved with concurent etition ?

I have same trouble with our users but in our case it happens some cases where last saved change overwrite changes of the other user.

It happen that we never gets the Option to merge change as a notification warning or something like that.

I go through the same reference documentation and it is absolutely not clear how it should behaves.

We are actually using Server version 8.6.4.

Can you share the way you solve it and how can you get the merge option display to users ?

Thnaks for help

regards

[Susan Roe (US - ASR)]

We are getting duplicate pages when 2 users edit at the same time. So we have a duplicate document and then have to compare both and delete one. 

What can be done to stop that behavior