I use the sharing feature in Calc and it works great. The lock solves the atomicity of the save operation and for this purpose creates a LO file .~Lock.FILENAME.ods# in the same directory as the saved file.
But there is a small problem with locking when saving. In the case of a shared file, unlocking is blocked by dialog that has no effect on the atomicity of the save operation - it is clear and just clicking on the information that the save was OK: “Your workbook has been updated by changes saved by other users [OK BUTTON]”.
But the lock is active until this dialog is over, and that’s the problem, because user interaction can take tens of seconds or indefinitely - and during this time the file is locked - unnecessarily IMHO. If the user forgets to close the dialog, where there is basically only the information that “everything is OK”, then it will make it impossible to save for the all other users. Therefore, I think it is a bad designed and certainly a less aggressive holding of the lock would improve the usability of this SW.
I understand that the lock cannot be released in the event of a conflict until the conflict is resolved and the save operation is complete. But if there is no conflict when saving, IMHO has no reason to keep the file locked just to wait for user interaction, where the dialog still informs him that everything is OK and no conflict has occurred. Calc keeps the file locked unnecessarily, the user only acknowledges that the save was without conflicts.
Is it possible to disable the “Your workbook has been updated by changes saved by other users [OK]” dialog box? Or is it possible to release the file lock before this dialog?