Very Scary Project Experience Last Night!

Elements Feedback
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@dan Yesterday I got my newest website live and was really happy with how it all worked out.

I had not shutdown Elements in a few days so I decided to close all of the open projects I was working on. When I came back to open the newest one I got a dialog telling me that the document was repaired and X number of items were recovered. Scared the hell out of me. Below is the dialog that was displayed.

CleanShot 2025-04-23 at 19.49.53@2x
CleanShot 2025-04-23 at 19.49.53@2x522Ă—718 97.3 KB

When I was finally able to get to the home page there were a bunch of large image placeholders at the top of the page. I deleted them, which did not seem to affect the layout of the page, so I have no idea what exactly the problem was. I then tried to save the project after performaing this cleanup and it would not save the project. So I quit and tried again. Same dialog popped up. This time I removed one item and saved and it worked, so I slowly repeated the process until all of the image placeholder were gone. Once again I was able to save the project.

I then made a copy just in case. But now I’m extremely hesitant to close this proejct in case I’m faced with the same issues.

I’m trying to think what was going wrong with the project as the other two I had been working on at the same time did not have this problem. I then realized the only thing that was different about this project was the fact that I had added PAGE ICONS, could that have been the problem?

I’m about to try closing the project again to see if the problem returns, but before I do that I’d really like to know what this “missing parent” issues means and where I should go looking for the problem.

Needless to say this was extremely disconcerting as I had just spent ten days creating this project and the thought of possibly having to start over was daunting. I shoudl also mention that I did try the backup that was created when the site was first uploaded and it had the same issues.

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I had one of these dialogs yesterday too!! :open_mouth:

On a pre-made project I had been modifying…had deleted a few pages to make a one-page “coming soon” site. Something very simple with only a handful of components. Perhaps because I broke some Globals?

Not sure either!

Yikes!

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Don’t panic, this is nothing to be alarmed about. Your project(s) are safe!

Elements is just tidying up the document and putting any orphan nodes it finds at the top of the page. These can safely be deleted.

We will improve this over time, but for now, don’t worry. Just tidy your project and save off a new version.

Slightly more in-depth explination for those interested…
When an object is deleted, the corresponding node and all of its child nodes should be recursively removed from the structure. However, this expected behavior doesn’t always occur reliably. The issue you’re encountering arises because Elements is currently removing the parent node before processing and detaching its child nodes. This sequencing can lead to orphaned nodes or inconsistencies in the document structure. We’re aware of this and will be making improvements to the deletion logic to ensure it’s more robust and handles these edge cases correctly.

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@dan I have every faith that you will do the right thing and that all of this come together in due course.

It really helps to know what is causing this as that makes it seem a lot less threatening.

The main thing that had me worried was after I deleted these orphaned items I could NOT save the project. So I tried again and it appeared I should have been doing some saving in between deleting them because that fixed the problem

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