It's not obvious what is "saving" a Canvas document

[Jim_Boutcher]

Here's my scenario:

Between one and three developers working on the same Canvas doc (multi-paged, but sometimes we're working on a single page). We also have the result of what we're working on broadcast on a large display in our area (front-ended by a Mac Mini).

What actions are causing a "save" to happen? And what must be done to pick up changes on other machines?

Some weird scenarios we've seen:

1. Developer A makes a modification to a canvas page. We go to the Mac Mini and hit reload (expecting to pick up the change) and it doesn't appear.

2. Mac Mini in presentation/full screen mode - for some reason, every page update and cycling between pages is executing an HTTP PUT request? Why PUT? Is it saving with every update?

3. Developer A and Developer B are in the same document - oh, I don't even know how to describe this - we just try to avoid each other "Okay, you go in now, Dev B! I just closed my browser!"

It would be useful if the "hide editing controls" would get the doc out of any sort of edit mode.

Can someone describe to me what actions trigger saves, how to get the most recent versions, and strategies for scenarios like I described above?

[afwilson (Alan Wilson)]

Speaking as Developer B in scenario 3, clicking "refresh" seems to save the Canvas instance but only when I clicked it really hard.

[tims (Tim Schnell)]

Hi @Jim_Boutcher,

While we have discussed making Canvas much more collaborative in nature, it's not something that we have specifically designed it for today.

For the Mac Mini, changing the page does send a request to persist the page number, you could consider creating a read-only user for the Mac Mini which would prevent saving the page number.

I think you have a number of good use-cases here for us to consider, if you'd like to submit an enhancement request you can do so here: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/new/choose

Thanks,
Tim

[Jim_Boutcher]

Done - https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/52102