Validate All Documents

[roedygr]

I make great use of validate all documents, save all and, and Close Complete which a large number of documents loaded at a time.
I gradually whittle away at the errors, with CSE and with background tools, working mostly on the documents whose tabs are in view. As documents are completed, other tabs appear to take their place.

Validate All Documents could be a little smarter.

1. It should make sure that there are no differences between loaded and backing store versions of the files first, and if so, get them resolved before validating. You should be able to keep ram/disk versions individually, or as a whole.

2. It should then revalidate only those documents that have changed since the last validation. Right now it appears to revalidate everything.

I also suspect a bug in this procedure, thought I have not caught it in the act. I have not figured out quite what is going on, but often my edits seem to mysteriously disappear. Maybe save all or Ctrl-S does not always take. Maybe if you do a revalidate, it masks background changes. I will keep an eye out for the exact conditions that lose edits. It could well be human error, but even for that there may be something the program could do to reduce the incidence.

[MikeGale]

Not sure if this would suit your working style.

I create a batch validation file (I build it from a list of URI's, which you could do with RegEx's if you wanted).

I then validate the batch from time to time during development.

I can also validate later, create a validation batch with the published site (as opposed to staging).

This is great if you have pages that are altered after publication by a CMS tool (or whatever).

The batch summary page is very useful in homing in on issues.

Your mileage might vary.

[Albert Wiersch]

1. It should make sure that there are no differences between loaded and backing store versions of the files first, and if so, get them resolved before validating.

Please try the v10 BETA and see if this works. It should now check to see if the file has changed on disk before validating when doing a "Validate All" operation.

2. It should then revalidate only those documents that have changed since the last validation. Right now it appears to revalidate everything.

Yes, this is a good suggestion but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort since it would take awhile to write and debug code to keep track of whether a document has changed since the last validation. I'll make a note about this for possible future implementation.

What about a feature that doesn't re-validate documents that have been validated and have not been selected to edit since the last validation? That might be less effort so I might be able to get that implemented sooner.

I also suspect a bug in this procedure, thought I have not caught it in the act. I have not figured out quite what is going on, but often my edits seem to mysteriously disappear.

Yes, please let me know if you can reproduce this issue and you think it's a bug in CSE HTML Validator.