The Status Bar and Live Updates
Aeon is a shared system: while you're reading a queue, a colleague two desks away is routing requests into it, and the screen keeps up with them. The thin bar along the bottom of the workspace is where Aeon reports that — what it's connected to, what it just did for you, what you have locked — and it's where you go to make it all hold still for a minute.
This page covers the bar itself and the Live updates control on it, then how lists and open records behave while other people are working in them.
- You're reading a long queue and the rows keep moving. Aeon holds them in place while you're in the list; the pill at the top of the list tells you what's waiting.
- You're working through something delicate — reconciling a merge, reading a history — and want nothing to change at all. Pause live updates.
- Something you did didn't seem to take. The status bar carries the confirmation; give it a look before repeating the action.
- You want to know which records you're holding open. The lock count on the left lists them, and lets you release them.
What's on the bar
The bar runs the full width of the window, below everything else.
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Left | The real-time connection — Connected, Connecting..., Reconnecting..., or Disconnected — then the Live updates control, then your lock count when you hold any. |
| Center | The most recent status message, with a dismiss button. |
| Right | Pending and failed outgoing-email counts, your current site, today's date, and the Aeon version you're running. |
On a narrow window the bar tightens its spacing and drops the date and version.
The connection indicator
Hovering it explains what the state means: "Real-time sync is active" when connected, "Connection lost, attempting to reconnect" while reconnecting, and so on. A disconnected client is still perfectly usable — you just won't see other people's changes arrive until it reconnects.
Your locks
When you hold one or more record locks, a count appears next to the connection indicator — 1 lock, 3 locks — with a padlock-and-person icon, the same glyph Aeon uses everywhere for your lock as opposed to somebody else's.
Click it to open the Active Locks list. Each row names the record (Request #12345, User jdoe, Activity #88); click a row to jump to that record, or use the ✕ that appears at the end of the row when you hover over it to release just that lock. Release All appears at the top when you hold more than one.
Messages
The center of the bar carries Aeon's short confirmations and warnings — "Processing request #12345", "Request #12345 locked by name", "Live updates paused". Only the newest is shown, so nothing piles up.
How long a message stays is your choice, not Aeon's: it uses the Message display time (sec) setting in User Preferences, and stays until you dismiss it when Keep messages until I dismiss them is on. Either way the message has a ✕ dismiss button at its right-hand end, so you can clear it as soon as you've read it.
A message raised while a dialog is open is a special case. It stays on the bar and is announced again the moment the dialog closes — so a confirmation you triggered from inside a dialog is still there when you come back out.
Message display time (sec) and Keep messages until I dismiss them govern the status bar and the messages that appear in the corner of the screen. Set them once, in User Preferences — see Dark Mode and Personal Preferences.
Pausing live updates
Next to the connection indicator is a control reading Live updates: on. Click it and it becomes Live updates: paused.
While it's paused, Aeon stops refreshing content: queues, search results, lists and open records stay exactly as they are, no matter who saves what. The things that are not content keep flowing — record locks, who else is viewing a record, and the marker showing that a record you have open has been edited by someone else. You still find out that something changed; the screen just doesn't change under you.
The control keeps count while it's paused. Once updates have been withheld it reads Live updates: paused, 4 waiting, so a paused screen never looks like a quiet one. Hovering explains the same thing: "Lists and records are not refreshing. Resume to load what changed."
Click it again to resume. Everything that was held arrives at once, and the bar confirms with "Live updates resumed".
The pause is for the session you're in. It isn't saved to your account, and signing out or reloading the page clears it.
Your own work is never held back — anything you save appears immediately, paused or not. Desktop notifications for new work follow their own check intervals in User Preferences and are unaffected.
How lists behave while other people work
Even with live updates on, a list you're reading holds still. Aeon splits what it does by whether the change would move anything:
- Values update in place, always. A row that's still in the list keeps its position and takes its new values where it sits. A count ticking over or a status changing never moves anything.
- Rows arriving, leaving, or re-sorting are held — but only while you're actually in the list, meaning your keyboard focus is inside it or you scrolled it in the last couple of seconds. A strip at the top of the list reads 3 updates waiting with a Show button. Click Show to take them now.
- Leaving applies them on its own. Move focus out of the list, or stop scrolling, and the held rows land without your having to ask. You never have to remember to press Show.
- Loading more is never held. Scrolling to the end of a long queue to load the next page adds rows past the end, which moves nothing, so it happens straight away.
This applies to the list view of request queues, search results, the users list, and the activities list. The grid view updates immediately.
How an open record behaves
An open request, user, or activity refreshes the same way — in place, not by being replaced.
When a colleague saves a record you have open, Aeon updates the fields you haven't touched and puts a message on the status bar: "Record updated by name". Fields you are part-way through editing are never overwritten. Your unsaved typing stays exactly as you left it.
If you and your colleague have both changed the same field, Aeon can't quietly pick one. A banner appears above the form — "This record changed by name while your edits were open." — naming up to three of the fields in question ("…and N more" for the rest) and offering two buttons:
- Keep mine — your unsaved values stand. The colleague's change to those fields is discarded when you save.
- Take theirs — your unsaved values for the conflicting fields are replaced by what's now on the server.
The banner doesn't take focus and doesn't have to be dismissed before you can carry on typing. Decide when you're ready.
The banner tells you a field you're editing has moved underneath you. Saving without reading it means your value wins by default and the other change is lost. It costs a moment to check which fields it names.
The status bar is the same for every staff member. What appears on it follows the permissions you already have: the outgoing-email counts appear only with View on Email, the site indicator only on a multi-site installation, and the lock count only when you're holding locks. Pausing live updates needs no permission and affects only your own screen.