fast_update not work with highlights/stories when in commit-mode

[pjw91]

Describe the bug
When downloading highlights/stories with the commit-mode and fast-update are on,
the fast-update has no effect.

To Reproduce
instaloader -F --highlights SOME_PROFILE --commit-mode --no-posts

Expected behavior
Skip those downloaded, as if commit-mode off.

Instaloader version
4.2.3

Additional context
The reason is that self._committed is never set in download_highlights and download_stories, and never reset to None after a post is processed (either downloaded or skipped).

That means:

1. _committed is always None, which effectively disables commit-mode
2. After processing a post, the flag is set to True/False, no matter what actually status of the next highlights/stories is.

After a quick review, it seems that add a line of code self._committed = self.check_if_committed(filename) at the top of download_pic fix this issue.
However, I think it should be add to download_stories/highlights or somewhere else.

[aandergr]

Thanks for reporting this and sharing your insights!

After a quick review, it seems that add a line of code self._committed = self.check_if_commited(filename) at the top of download_pic fix this issue.

That would check_if_committed for each item in a sidecar, though one check would be sufficient.

However, I think it should be add to download_stories/highlights or somewhere else.

Or download_storyitem, which is used both for downloading stories and highlights.

Also, I think passing this _committed state through a class variable is unclean, error-prone and blocking thread-parallelization - we may have merged the PR (#139) too early and probably should reimplement the commit mode. @sushilicious any ideas/thoughts about this?

[davispuh]

This looks fixed/resolved to me, no ?

[aandergr]

This looks fixed/resolved to me, no ?

No, there hasn't been any work on this.

[sushilicious]

Yeah sorry I've never used the stories or highlights feature, so I didn't think to implement the commit mode for that. As is mentioned in the first post, adding the check for committed in download_stories/highlights is probably the right thing to do.

@aandergr, sounds totally reasonable to change the _committed state to something else. The patch was mostly just a quick and dirty thing that I wrote up since the lack of a commit state was bothering me. If someone else plans to properly implement this feature, I also recommend using something other than the json metadata file as the flag for "already committed". That file can get quite large, so a different indicator might make more sense. For example, saving currently downloading pictures/videos to a temp file and renaming it after it is done, so uncommitted pics/videos do not enter your download folder.

[github-actions]

There has been no activity on this issue for an extended period of time. This issue will be closed after further 14 days of inactivity.

[aandergr]

This has been fixed by #697.

Rather than checking the json file to make sure posts have been successfully downloaded, data is stored in a temporary file which is renamed when downloading has finished.

It is merged into upcoming/v4.5, which can be tried out with:

pip3 install --upgrade git+https://github.com/instaloader/instaloader@upcoming/v4.5