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bugs - Notebook's TaggingRules inherit too much


Bug introduced in V10.4 or earlier and persisting through V12.0



[CASE:3852725] was created


[...] I have forwarded an incident report to our developers with the information you provided. [...]






This small helper function will show us TaggingRules written explicitly to the notebook. (Because Options/CurrentValue show values merged from $FrontEnd/$FrontEndSession too)


nbTR[] :=  TaggingRules /. List @@ Rest @ NotebookGet @ EvaluationNotebook[]

Here is the story:




  • create a new notebook and evaluate:


    CurrentValue[$FrontEndSession, {TaggingRules, "a"}] = 1;



  • now we can check that notebook's TaggingRules are nicely merged even though they are not written explicitly:


    CurrentValue[EvaluationNotebook[], {TaggingRules, "a"}]
    nbTR[]


    1


    TaggingRules






  • Pay attention now! Let's use example from documentation: TaggingRules / Applications


    So we want to have some tagging rules local to the notebook:


    CurrentValue[
    EvaluationNotebook[], {TaggingRules, "InputFieldState"}
    ] = "initial string";


  • And let's check:



     CurrentValue[EvaluationNotebook[], {TaggingRules, "InputFieldState"}]


    "initial string"



    but


    nbTR[]


    {......., "a" -> 1 (??!!), "InputFieldState" -> "initial string"}






So the bottom line is, if the notebook doesn't contain TaggingRules explicitly then it will inherit all you have in $FrontEnd/$FrontEndSession!


And this is a problem because:




  • I didn't modify "a"'s value on a notebook level but it is now localized here and won't inherit external changes:


    CurrentValue[$FrontEndSession, {TaggingRules, "a"}] = 22;
    CurrentValue[$
    FrontEndSession, {TaggingRules, "a"}]

    CurrentValue[EvaluationNotebook[], {TaggingRules, "a"}]


    22


    1 (!!!)





  • Not to mention that you write to file possibly private data without notice.





I consider this a serious flaw. Any suggested prevention measures?



Answer



The only solution I've found is to set empty Tagging rules first:


CurrentValue[EvaluationNotebook[], TaggingRules] = {};

CurrentValue[ EvaluationNotebook[], {TaggingRules, "InputFieldState"}] = "initial string";

Which is fine enough for my purposes but this is ok only if the notebook was just created or you know that there aren't any TaggingRules.





The problem of course appears when you don't know and you don't want to overwrite them with {}. Options / CurrentValue (Absolute or not) will only tell you what is there with already included $FrontEnd values, so to check what is explicitly written you have to call NotebookGet, and it doesn't scale well as notebook size grows.


So to check you can run:


MemberQ[TaggingRules -> _] @ Rest @ NotebookGet[]



p.s. there is an undocumented syntax for CurrentValue so that by using:


CurrentValue[$FrontEndSession, {TaggingRules, "test"}, 2]

we say "give me TaggingRules 'test' value and if it doesn't exist, set it to 2 and return 2. Very convenient. But


CurrentValue[EvaluationNotebook[], TaggingRules, {}]


doesn't work in this case :)


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