Shared Pins are Missing

[TMO]

A campaign that I DM went on hold for a few months but we are finally resuming our game tomorrow. I loaded the campaign in FG to make sure I have everything prepped and ready but I've discovered that every shared pin on my maps have gone away. The content that the pins pointed to appear to be intact, but that was a lot of pins that I was adding as the campaign progressed that are no longer there. What would cause that to happen?

[damned]

Try using one of the earlier saved backups and see if the data shows correctly there.

[TMO]

Try using one of the earlier saved backups and see if the data shows correctly there.

Good idea. Is that as simple as renaming one of the db.session.xxxxxxx.xml files as db.xml?

[Zacchaeus]

Yes, but back everything up first.

[damned]

The best way is to rename the db.xml as db.current.xml
Check its size and look against the most previous backups.
Choose the one based on size and date that you think is the best one to try and copy that one to db.xml

Which is - as Zacchaeus suggests - backing things up first.

[TMO]

I went through several of my "session" backup files, including those dated weeks prior to our last session, and none of them provided me with the shared pins.

I have full backups of my entire Data folder. So, I restored one of those folders and voila, the pins have been restored. However, I don't want to just rely upon this restored folder because I changes to the current campaign. One way or another I would have to redo work if I can't find a way to merge the two.

I find it curious that some of the older session XML files would not restore the pins. This suggests to me that shared pins are managed by something other than or in addition to the db.xml file. Any suggestions on how I can bring my shared pins into my most current campaign?

[TMO]

The best way is to rename the db.xml as db.current.xml
Check its size and look against the most previous backups.
Choose the one based on size and date that you think is the best one to try and copy that one to db.xml

Which is - as Zacchaeus suggests - backing things up first.

Yep...that's exactly what I did but as you may have already read, none of those files (which date back over a year) had my shared pins. They had other campaign data that was relatively current, but just not my pins. I had to restore my entire data folder from a manual backup to get my pins back but I would like to restore the pins in current campaign file because of other work I had already begun.

As a follow-up to my confusion about the pins not be restored via the old session XML files, would clearing my cache have this affect? I had a DM recently ask me to do this to fix some issues I was having with his campaign. I discovered the hard way this clears out all of my shortcuts. It made me wonder what is gets cleared.

[damned]

Load your latest db.xml that wasnt working for shared pins.
Add a pin and share.
/save
Exit

Make sure you have a copy of the db.xml - eg db.current.xml from above
Open the db.xml in a text or code editor.
Find using search the new shared pin code.

Open the db.xml from the campaign where they are working.
Copy the code for all the pins - get the start and end correct - all xml tags must be properly opened and closed - into the target/new/current one.

Test.

[TMO]

Excellent advice and this was what I was attempting to do but I seem to be ignorant about finding the pin code. My apologies if this is obvious but I'm not quite certain what to search for.

[damned]

Search for the name of the Pin.

[TMO]

Search for the name of the Pin.

This is where I am feeling pretty dumb. I assume the name of the pin is the name of the item I dragged onto the map, correct? For instance, I dragged an item from the campaign onto my map and shared it:

22504

I then look through my XML for "A Necklace String" but no dice.

[damned]

Just search for the word necklace in this case.

[TMO]

Just search for the word necklace in this case.

Yes, did that too. Tried looking for any of the words in the name of that pin with no success. "Necklace" does come up a couple of times but only has content in a couple of stories in my campaign. Nothing at all that resembles the pin. I'm doing a case-insensitive search.

I'm going to try and use a file compare utility to see what is different and perhaps that will point me in the right direct.

[damned]

Apologies - I just tested.
Ok when Necklace comes up find that records ID (eg id-00028).
Then search on that ID.
You will get several hits - at least one will look like: <recordname>encounter.id-00028</recordname>

You will find code like this:
<shortcuts>
<shortcut>
<public />
<x>146</x>
<y>519</y>
<class>encounter</class>
<recordname>encounter.id-00028</recordname>
</shortcut>
</shortcuts>

You shoudl find all the shorts for an image in the same section of code but each image will have its own shortcuts section.

[TMO]

Okay...finally figured this one out. I'm not sure if the problem was my failure to explain the situation clearly enough or something else, but the information I was looking for was not in db.xml from my campaign folder but rather in DD Princes of the Apocalypse.xml from my campaign\moduledb folder. As you will surmise, this campaign is running PotA. The shared pins are added to the image maps as defined in my module. The items which the pins points to are stored in db.xml, but those were never missing...just the pins. Thus, searching for those strings as you kept suggesting was correct but I needed to change the location of my search.

Thank you for staying with me on this. In the end your guidance was helpful. Let me know if I didn't explain my situation correctly as I want to understand and explain things better.

[Moon Wizard]

Yeah, any modifications to an existing module within a campaign are stored within the moduledb/ subfolder within the campaign folder. The db.xml only contains data entered specifically for that campaign.

Cheers,
JPG

[damned]

Yeah, any modifications to an existing module within a campaign are stored within the moduledb/ subfolder within the campaign folder. The db.xml only contains data entered specifically for that campaign.

Cheers,
JPG

Yep and that was news to me too!