Template not refreshing after moving documents to a new folder

[makilahy1]

I have an ordinary template saved in the root of the template manager. The template contains custom styles that I use within a master document and the subdocuments. In the past, I’ve had no problems making changes to the template and the documents prompting for a refresh when opened. Now, however, none of my documents are prompting for a refresh.

All that has changed is that I moved the master document and its subdocuments to a new folder. I initially created everything in a test folder in My Documents, and I have since moved them to a new folder, also within My Documents (same computer). Moving the documents back to the test folder fixed the problem. Before that, I tried restarting in safe mode and refreshing from the template manager, but neither worked. The path for the templates is correct.

I’m going to change the template assigned to a document, but I’d like to know why this broke the link.

I’m running LO 7.0.2.4 64-bit on Windows 10.

[ajlittoz]

In the XML representation of your document, path to the template is recorded as a relative path rooted at the directory where you store the document. Consequently, when you move your document to another location from which the path to the template master directory is different in its relative form than the previous one, you are faced with what you describe.

The convenient way to deal with it is to download the Template Changer extension from the LO site. You can then change the template (in fact reapply the same) to fix the issue.

The problem comes from a limitation in ODF format and I don’t see how it could be remedied (maybe needs a modification to ODF and this case is consequently very long because there needs to be an agreement on changing the standard, with all the implications on existing documents which could break).

[makilahy1]

@ajlittoz Thank you for explaining. I was wondering why they used a relative path. Too bad they can’t fix it.