Question: How to Share Postico app state between machines

[stevemcmillen]

I'd like to be able to share the app state between 2 computers. Let me explain: I have a desktop and a laptop. I use postico on both - I prefer the desktop but have to use laptop from meetings and/or at home. When switching, if I forget to export (before leaving one machine) and import (before starting to edit the automatically loaded previous state), then I LOOSE CHANGE. This has happened too many times :(

Goal:

I want Postico to allow me to edit same file(s) across multiple machines w/o having to export and load the query.

On a single machine, postico behaves awesome!! It always remembers edits between sessions for a given DB connection. This is really helpful!!

So my question is:

Is there any way to get this same behavior across multiple machines?

@jakob - is this a viable pull request or out of the scope of the app roadmap? I feel that a lot of users would find this capability very helpful but maybe there are not as many users working across machines as I think.

Ideas I have explored:

1. Move postico settings/state files to a shared network drive (such as dropbox).
   -- I tried this but have been unsuccessful. I'd love to hear from others about how this might be done.
2. Postico automatically saves all changes to the file loaded via "Load query" and automatically loads that file upon statup (or if it detects any changes to the file) -- I've filed separate request about this (See Issue #46 ) for which jakob commented that is not really feasible for Postico design :(

My attempt at 1. above:

I tried to symlink (to a dropbox location where i moved the files to) the following locations with mixed results - state was retained until I tried to open on 2nd machine in which case postico reset to new state.

/Users/stevemc/Library/Application\ Scripts/at.eggerapps.Postico
/Users/stevemc/Library/Containers/at.eggerapps.Postico
/Users/stevemc/Library/Preferences/at.eggerapps.Postico.plist
/private/var/db/BootCaches/E25CD479-0B9C-44E8-80C3-9A09CD4F624E/app.at.eggerapps.Postico.playlist
/private/var/folders/w9/fd8y8blj2fj063l84wtlv29r0000gn/C/at.eggerapps.Postico
/private/var/folders/w9/fd8y8blj2fj063l84wtlv29r0000gn/T/at.eggerapps.Postico

From what I can tell at least some of these locations are machine-specific for MacOS and it would seem that trying to share them between machines is not supported. I tried googling and found surprisingly little info about sharing app state between machines in this way (I thought this would be useful for many apps). I did find info about how to migrate apps but more about settings (not about state). I think Postico is likely leveraging the MacOS specific services to save state and I don't know yet if its possible for this state to be shared. It might require changes to postico to allow this.

[fvvliet]

Same question here...

[jakob]

There is no easy way to share Postico state across machines at the moment. I am aware that this is a significant shortcoming, and we are working on improving this, but for now, there is no way to do this.

If you'd like to help us explore possible approaches to this problem (and test prerelease versions of Postico), please email us at [email protected]!