Saving a Gdoc is happening in a race condition, reverting the save right after (sometimes)

[marcelgerber]

Description

There is a race condition in saving condition which, when hit, can lead to:

• A gdoc being saved upon user request (e.g. published)
• The same gdoc being unpublished right after, since it is overwritten by a periodic refresh from Google Docs:

  owid-grapher/adminSiteServer/apiRouter.ts

  Lines 2504 to 2506 in 9b1028b

  	if (!gdoc.published) {
  	await dataSource.getRepository(Gdoc).create(gdoc).save()
  	}

From my own experience, I would say this behavior happens in about 30% of cases.

Additional context

Possible solutions:

• Only call .save() if the gdoc revisionId has changed (easy; there's still a chance we erroneously overwrite it although far less likely)
• Check that updatedAt hasn't changed before updating the record in the DB (easy; there's still a chance we erroneously overwrite it although far less likely)
• Only update fields like content, and not slug or published

[ikesau]

I think a relatively simple way to fix this would be to add an endpoint for publishing, and ignoring the property otherwise.

While we're at it, let's double check with the authors and make sure autosave is wanted at all. We could simplify things a lot without it.

[danyx23]

We're not doing the automatic preview anymore so this one is no longer relevant.