tinacms: Renaming/Deleting file (that has references) leads to errors

Describe the issue that you’re seeing. Any Loom videos or screenshots usually help a lot!

If I change the file name of an author I get the following error: Screenshot 2023-11-27 195254

I can no longer access the Authors panel. Would be nice if an user renames an author file that everything get associated to that file name also get’s rename to the new file name to prevent any errors.

Reproduction

https://github.com/Remzi1993/tina-test

Steps to reproduce

Create a project in CLI with npx create-tina-app@latest Use Tailwind CSS as starter and go to localhost:3000/admin and click on Authors and change an author’s file name.

I used NPM

System Info

System:
    OS: Windows 11 10.0.22631
    CPU: (16) x64 AMD Ryzen 7 5825U with Radeon Graphics
    Memory: 694.11 MB / 15.31 GB
  Binaries:
    Node: 21.2.0 - C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.EXE
    Yarn: 1.22.19 - ~\Projects\test-tina-project\node_modules\.bin\yarn.CMD
    npm: 10.2.3 - C:\Program Files\nodejs\npm.CMD
  Browsers:
    Edge: Chromium (119.0.2151.72)
    Internet Explorer: 11.0.22621.1
  npmPackages:
    @tinacms/cli: ^1.5.34 => 1.5.34
    tinacms: ^1.5.24 => 1.5.24

Validations

Follow our Code of Conduct
Read the docs.
Check that there isn’t already an issue that reports the same bug.

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 7 months ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 15 (5 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Ha, I can confirm that as mentioned by @Remzi1993 there is no appropriate warning in the deletion message.

The rename functionality does seem to have a message but I would argue that this message only makes sense to developers. We know what references are and what the effect of unresolved references is. To content editors, this message isn’t very clear.

I can imagine full referential integrity being a complex issue @logan-anderson, there are probably lots of edge cases. I do think that most of the default issues can be solved quite easily. Say you’re working on file ./data/team-member/john-doe.json and it gets removed/renamed. It is easy to check the other JSON files for any reference to this file and update/remove it.

Indeed! You have described exactly what I mean. For us developers it’s not a problem, but I’m looking for a solution for the average user and person who wants to edit their website without understanding code or anything technical. I would like to replace WordPress (WP), because of PHP and other outdated tech and bloated code. Currently, WP adds 2 seconds to loading time and is a drag on everything. I use Vite and Vue, but you can’t expect non-technical users to code their own website. There are a lot of solutions out there, but they are all bloated and either use PHP or are too complex or too much for simple websites, like a bakery on the corner or a small bike shop, they don’t care and want to easily update their websites.

This is literally the only showstopper to make this CMS go big and be a WP replacement.

Remzi1993 on Dec 19, 2023

@Remzi1993 we currently do not have support for referential integrity in TinaCMS and have a warning when deleting or changing the name of files.

We are aware of this issue (it is a complex issue) and want to add support for referential integrity but we have no current plans for this to be added in the next 1-4 months.

logan-anderson on Nov 27, 2023

Ha, I can confirm that as mentioned by @Remzi1993 there is no appropriate warning in the deletion message.

The rename functionality does seem to have a message but I would argue that this message only makes sense to developers. We know what references are and what the effect of unresolved references is. To content editors, this message isn’t very clear.

I can imagine full referential integrity being a complex issue @logan-anderson, there are probably lots of edge cases. I do think that most of the default issues can be solved quite easily. Say you’re working on file ./data/team-member/john-doe.json and it gets removed/renamed. It is easy to check the other JSON files for any reference to this file and update/remove it.

Jasperrr91 on Dec 19, 2023

I wonder if there’s a half-step here where we just warn the user upon certain actions (rename / delete) that this will break any active relationships.

Ideally we could conditionally show this only when documents have a reference to it, but an even easier step would be to always show it.

There is a warning when a user tries to change an author’s name, but there is no warning when you change the file name or the reverse. I forgot.

Remzi1993 on Nov 28, 2023

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think we share your that dream scenario.

Only one point of clarification, it doesn’t appear that Keystatic supports referential integrity. See the heads up note here https://keystatic.com/docs/fields/relationship.

kldavis4 on Nov 28, 2023

@logan-anderson Thank you for the timeframe. I will check back a year later to be sure. In the meantime, the hobby projects and small websites from old friends will be running WordPress until that time comes.

I’ll point at that the number of users reporting issues with referential integrity is very low. If there were more users asking for it, I’m sure we would already have made it a higher priority, but that has not been the case so far. Fortunately, since Tina is Git-backed, it is pretty easy to recover from a mistake. There are lots of valid reasons to not migrate from WP to Tina, but unless your use-case is atypical, this is probably not one of them.

I would be more afraid that a user who has no technical knowledge would try to do things and then see errors leaving it to me to fix while a CMS should have given developers more time to spend on other things. I speculate that the user base of TinaCMS has technical knowledge otherwise they wouldn’t be able to use git and that would explain users reporting issues with referential integrity is very low. And as you said yourself revert an error is reverting a git commit. The problem is that the people outside the technical community and everyday users of society wouldn’t have knowledge of git. My advice for TinaCMS is to also understand this phenomena, so it could grow beyond a small technical user base and be used as the next WordPress, because WordPress has become a drag on everybody and I really want an easy CMS to succeed. For example I also found an alternative which is trying to do something similar to TinaCMS, which is called Keystatic and they seem to have referential integrity built-in.

My only hope is that we can ditch WordPress in the future and that a simple CMS succeeds and preferably with plugin support in the future.

At this point I’m writing my dream scenario 😅😂

Remzi1993 on Nov 28, 2023