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Saving your document

Owned by Matt Lynch
Last updated: 03 Sept 2022
3 min read

This page explains how to save your document in the Editor and what happens when you do.

Lawmaker also auto-saves your documents every 2 minutes. And you can save a snapshot of your document at any time.

How to save a document

To save changes in your document, do one of the following:

  • In the toolbar, click on the Save button.

  • In the toolbar menus, click Document>Save.

  •  Use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+s.

What happens when you save a document

Lawmaker will save the changes you made so that the copy on the server is the same as the one in the Editor. To do this, it only saves the fragments of the document that you have locks on (see Multi-user editing and locks) because a lock will have been established as soon as you made a change to a particular fragment.

In addition, as a backup in case there is a problem with saving the fragments or the document gets corrupted, a full snapshot of the document is also saved (called “AUTO-BACKUP”). Each time you save, the existing auto-backup version is replaced.

Once the save action is completed, any locks you had on the document will be released, and the Editor will be updated with any changes that other users have made to the document.

Saving amendment lists

When you save an amendment list, some additional things happen:

  • Lawmaker will assign each amendment a unique reference, known as a D-number or Dnum.  The amendment will keep this reference for its lifetime and will be useful to refer to before they are assigned their official number as part of the parliamentary process. The D-numbers are based on the organisation that creates the amendment.

  • The instruction text of each amendment is parsed to extract key information about the amendment that is used to correctly filter and sort the amendment in official lists. You can see the result of the parsing in the Amendment Information panel in the Editor.

Auto-save

Lawmaker will auto-save the document in the Editor every 2 minutes.

The auto-save version appears as a snapshot called “auto-save” on the Project Tab (see Documents and folders on the Project Tab). Only you can see the auto-save snapshot.

When you manually save your changes, any auto-saved snapshot version will be discarded.

When you open a working version, Lawmaker will check whether you have any previous unsaved changes relating to the document version (i.e. whether an auto-save snapshot exists).  If there are, you can either:

  • Continue working on your changes, which will use the auto-save snapshot to restore the last auto-saved version, or

  • Discard your changes, which will open the last manually saved version of the document (and discard the auto-saved version).

Saving snapshots of your document

You can save a snapshot of the document you are editing at any time. This will create a copy of the document in its current state and save it as a snapshot in the document’s version history without affecting the main version of the document (i.e. the one that is saved when you press the Save button).

To save a snapshot:

  1. In the upper toolbar, select Document>Take snapshot.

  2. Edit the snapshot name in the Version Label field (it is set to “Saved” by default)

  3. Click OK.

Hints and tips

  • The system will not allow you to navigate away from the project or open a new document version in the Editor if you have a document open with unsaved changes.

  • See Documents and folders on the Project Tab for more about document versions (working, significant and snapshot).

  • See Multi-user editing and locks for more about fragments and locking.