Tatin and OneDrive

OneDrive is cloud storage offered by Microsoft for backing up some of your personal folders.

In the context of Tatin, the folder Documents\ is of particular interest.

For decades, Dyalog has saved (or potentially saved) stuff in a version agnostic folder named Dyalog APL Files in the Documents\ folder, and also version specific stuff. For example, for version 19.0 there is a folder Dyalog APL-64 19.0 Unicode Files created in Documents/.

Until version 0.114.0 Tatin questioned the environment variable USERPROFILE in order to find out where to copy Tatin to. For example, for a user JohnDoe that would usually result in

C:\Users\JohnDoe\Documents\

This is true no matter whether OneDrive is used or not.

This means that in case OneDrive is used and the Documents folder is managed by OneDrive (the user might use OneDrive and still decide against this!), then USERPROFILE is misleading.

Tatin now uses the — at the time of writing — inofficial I-beam 4070⌶0 which in the second item of the result gives the location of the Dyalog files folder for the currently running version of Dyalog, for example for a user JohnDoe:

      2⊃4070⌶0
C:\Users\JohnDoe\OneDrive\Documents\Dyalog APL-64 19.0 Unicode Files

With version 0.114.0 Tatin has adopted this and can therefore deal with a Documents/ folder that is saved in OneDrive.

Any attempt to update an older version than 0.114.0 will appear to be successful, but after a restart you will still use the old version.

The reason for this is that older versions were installed into

C:\Users\JohnDoe\Documents\Dyalog APL-64 19.0 Unicode Files

while the updated version is copied into

C:\Users\JohnDoe\OneDrive\Documents\Dyalog APL-64 19.0 Unicode Files

when your are running version 19.0

If this hits you your are advised to carry out these steps:

1. Add the path

   C:/Users/<⎕AN>/OneDrive/Documents/Dyalog APL-64 19.0 Unicode Files/SessionExtensions/CiderTatin

   to SALT's cmddir and remove the path

   C:/Users/<⎕AN>/Documents/Dyalog APL-64 19.0 Unicode Files/SessionExtensions/CiderTatin

   from it.

2. Remove the folder

   C:/Users/JohnDoe/Documents/Dyalog APL-64 19.0 Unicode Files/SessionExtensions/CiderTatin

   from your disk.

This solves the problem permanently in the sense that future updates will work as expected.

However, if you are going back to any ill-behaving version, for example by executing this command:

      ]activate -reset

then you are back on a version that won't work when an update is issued, until Dyalog ships a new version, when this document will change as well.