Adding Rules to Local User got to Tabular Editor folder, not Tabular Editor 3

[edhans]

Describe the issue
I am not sure if this a bug, a design decision, or an error in my understanding. I wanted to test how to populate BPA rules from a shared BPA.JSON file. I deleted my local BPARules.json from my local/TabularEditor3 folder, then opened the BPA rule sample file I had and cloned them to the Local User section and close TE3.

The new BPARules.JSON was put in local/TabularEditor, not /TabularEditor3 where it was before.

I do have both TE2 and TE3 installed.

** Which version are you currently using? **
Tabular Editor 3, 3.9, Enterprise

To Reproduce
Both desktop and service

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Close TE3
2. Go to local/Tabular Editor 3 and move the BPARules.json file somewhere else
3. Open TE3. You will have no rules.
4. Open the BPA Rules window, click Add, Include Local Rule file.
5. Navigate to the file you moved in step #2 above
6. Highlight all of the rules Move to the Rules for Local User, select Clone the rules.
7. Close TE3

There will be no BPARules.json in your local/Tabular Editor 3 folder, at least not if you also have TE2 installed. It will be there.

Expected behavior
Mostly I expect consistency. I am not sure it is broken, but it is a bit confusing.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• Windows version 10

[edhans]

Additional data point - I put the BPARules.JSON back in local/TabularEditor3 and after playing around, TE3 will use the file in this folder even if one exists in the /TabluarEditor folder.

Apparently if you have both TE2 and TE3 installed then:

• TE2 can only use rules in the /TabularEditor folder
• TE3 can use rules in either /TabularEditor or /TabularEditor3 folder
• If rules exist in both, TE3 will use the rules in the /TabularEditor3 folder.

Maybe best practices for rules should be to keep them in the /TabularEditor folder unless you have a need to keep the rules different for some reason between TE/2 and TE/3.

[DBojsen]

Hi @edhans

Have been testing this a lot now, and cannot reproduce that the file will be written to %localappdata%\TabularEditor.
Nor can I find any code that is capable of writing to that directory.

What I did find, is code that loads BPARules.json from the TE2 dir, if it is present and there is no TE3 file.
So this is by design.

AFAIK there are still some things you cannot do in TE2 BPA Rules, so I wouldn't advice to just keep one copy in TE2 dir.
What you can do is use a symbolic link to use the same file in both dirs if you want to. This is transparent to the application.

If you can produce a recording of the issue, then we can dig deeper, but haven't been able to reproduce.

[m-kovalsky]

What things can be done in TE3 BPA rules which cannot be done in TE2 BPA rules?