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Manage Conflicts

Understanding Conflicts in Data Synchronization

Conflicts occur when any of these conditions is met:

1) distinct users set the same attribute on the same feature to different values; 2) a primary key is employed twice. While highly unlikely have conflicts, preventing, mitigating and resolving conflicts is important to maintain data integrity in a healthy QGIS project. Here are some tips and tricks to do just that.

How to Avoid Conflicts?

  1. Unique "fid" Serial Numbers:
  2. When creating a feature, it is recommended to assign a unique "fid" serial number to each feature in the layers.

  3. Use the expression "epoch(now())" (without the double quote) in the "fid" to generate a unique identifier per millisecond, reducing the possibility of duplicate "fid" numbers.

  4. Planning and Designation:

  5. For updating existing features based on field conditions, plan and designate the features each user will update.
  6. Users should avoid changing the "fid" or identifier numbers.

How to Resolve Conflicts?

  • By default, QFieldCloud overwrites conflicts using a last wins policy (the latest patch of changes to the attribute(s) involved in the conflict replaces all earlier patches of changes to these attributes). Alternatively, admins can set a project's conflict resolution policy to manual. Doing so will require the project manager to manually resolve conflicts, picking those to be applied to the project.

  • When dealing with conflicts:

  • Navigate to the "Changes" section.
  • Filter the changes with the "Not_applied" status.
  • For each conflicted change, select it and set the status to "Re-apply" from the "Action" dropdown menu, alternatively if all the new changes are in conflict you can choose in the last conflicted change and select "Re-apply this and newer changes".
  • Check the details of changes in the conflict and click "Save All" at the end of the page.
  • Refer to our official documentation Delta apply for additional information.