Explaining deletion

Rationale

Sometime, you have bugs. Card or notes are deleted, and you just don't know why. You can find the notes in the file deleted.txt, at least if you are lucky, and that the deletion was clean enough to be logged.

However, when you want to know why the problem did occur, you miss two important facts. The time of the deletion. And its reason.

Furthermore, the same separator (tab) is used for separating the fields's content, and separating the fields content from the main column. This does not help readability.

This add-on logs everything in CSV format, which is non-ambiguous (as long as you know the note type)

Usage

All kinds of deletions

When this add-on is installed, when a note is deleted, it will be logged in deleted_long.txt instead of deleted.txt. The reason will be logged. Currently, there may be three kinds of reason:

You actually asked to delete a whole not. It can appear in the following cases:

• "Deletion of note {id} requested from the reviewer." While reviewing card, you pressed on «delete».
• "Deletion of notes {nids} requested from the browser" In the browser, you pressed on delete.
• "Temporary note" (i.e. you started to create a note, and then decided you don't want to save it)
• "Remove cards/notes from grave, after sync." This may occur during synchronization. I'm not sure when it actually occurs.
• "Removing notes {ids} with missing note type" For some reason, you had a note and anki does not have any idea how to represent it. Instead of telling you something REALLY wrong occured, and giving you the data to save it, anki silently delete all of this. Pretty bad, isn't it ? I sadly have no solution, it would require a big and complicated add-on to fix it. So my best right now is to at least let you kow in the deletion file.
• "Note {ids} with no cards" It may occur that a not have no cards anymore. For example if you empty all of its fields. Or at least, that there are so little fields used that no cards can be generated. Once again, instead of letting you correct this error, anki silently delete the note. You'll be able to find when this happen thanks to this add-on. At least, if you go in the deleted file. Sorry that I can't do better.

You may also decide to delete cards, realize that this lead no card to some note, and thus deleted the note. It may occur in the following cases:

• "Cards {ids} removed because of missing templates." Similar to last case, but instead of a whole note missing, a single template of a card is missing.
• "Deleting cards {cids} because we delete the model {m}". A model is being deleted. You probably was warned that it still had some notes, and agreed to have it deleted. Thus here it is.
• "Removing card type {template} from model {m}" Similarly to last case, but this case with card type.
• "Removing cards {cids} because its deck {did} is deleted" Once again, it's similar, but with deck deletion.
• "Changing notes {nids} from model {oldModel} to {newModel}, leading to deletion of {deleted}" Changing the note type of a note is essentially creating a new note and deleting the old one. Kind of. Anyway, it leads to card deletion, and there it is.

Finally, it may also occur that we have no clue why the deletion occured. It was probably an add-on request, thus the current add-on can't control it. This is thus the best error message that I can offer.

• "Card {ids} removed, no card remained, so note also removed." Anki was asked to remove cards, but not for any previously listed reason.
• "Removing notes {ids}" Similarly to last case, this just means that we have no informations more precise to give.

Warning

It is highly probable that this add-on will be incompatible with other add-ons. Because it changes a lot of things. Sadly, it seems hard to do really better. Please let me know whether you find some problem, with which add-on you have those problem. It means that this add-on may be better for debugging purpose than for every day use. I'm not sur.

In particular it is incompatible with add-ons:

• Quicker Anki: 802285486
• Database checker/fixer explained, more fixers 1135180054

Please instead use-addon 777545149 which merges those three add-ons

Internal

This add-on redefine the following methods:

• In anki.collection: _Collection._remNotes, _Collection.fixIntegrity, _Collection.remCards, remNotes,
• In aqt.AddCards: AddCards.removeTempNote,
• In anki.sync: Syncer.remove,
• In anki.models: ModelManager.rem, ModelManager.remTemplate, _changeCards
• In anki.decks: DeckManager.rem
• In aqt.reviewer: Reviewer.onDelet
• In aqt.browser: Browser._deleteNotes
• In aqt.main: AnkiQt.BackupThread.onRemNotes

Version 2.0

It won't be updated. It add only a single more column, with the reason. And it's less precise. It also only update _Collection._remNotes and the methods calling it, this _Collection._remNotes, i.e. _Collection.remCards, _Collection.fixIntegrity, Syncer.remove and AddCards.removeTempNote.

Todo

May be allow to use configuration to decide which note to use, which method to redefine.

Links, licence and credits