Merging 2 locations?

Arc App Support
1

Is there any way to merge two locations?

There seem to be 2 „Home“ entries I must have added somewhere over the last years and I’m always confused which one to choose when confirming my daily timeline.

2

Unfortunately not yet! This is definitely something I want to add at some stage though.

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3

Consider upvoting here: Merge duplicate places | Arc App on changemap

A manual approach to solve it:

  1. Check in the place details how many visits your places have, and decide for a future main place
  2. Rename the places (like Place Duplicate)
  3. Go to search, search for place duplicate and manually reassign the dupe places to the main place

This is exhaustive though for duplicate places that have been used hundreds of times. I’ve got so many duplicates that an automatic approach is required to solve all of them at some point.

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4

First of all, just want to say that I’m a huge fan of the app and it’s such an impressive work for an one man army, from one iOS dev to the other :slight_smile:

Is there a way to manually do this?

Peaking into the backup files, here’s what I’m attempting to do:

  1. I can find the two places I’d like to merge. Let’s call them “PlaceA” and “PlaceA_dup” with placeId “aaaa” and “bbbb” respectively.
  2. Find and replace all “bbbb” with “aaaa” in all files in the “TimelineItem” folder
  3. Delete app, reinstall, and restore from backup

Now I’m stuck in the restore phase (“Downloading from iCloud” specifically), which from what I read in the forum could take a really long time. I’m not sure if that’s expected, or if I’ve corrupted my backup file, so thought I’d ask :slight_smile:

Also, should I delete the files with “bbbb” in the “Place” folder?

5

Thanks @itsjlin!

You can actually do this without restoring from backup. Do the modifications to the backup files, as you already have, then copy the modified files into the Import folder on iCloud Drive, then open the File Importer view in Arc’s Settings → Backup, Import & Export, then tap on the files in there to update the existing database data with your changes in the files.

A few extra details:

  • You’ll need to increment the lastSaved dates on the modified objects in the JSON, to ensure that the importer recognises the changes as being newer than what’s in the database.
  • The files actually need to go into object type named folders inside the Import folder. So, like iCloud Drive/Arc App/Import/TimelineItem/[put modified item files here]

It’s a fiddly process, for sure, and I ultimately want to make it possible to do place dupe cleanups inside the app. (That’s high on my todo list, because whenever someone runs into a dupe place problem it’s a massive headache to manually clean up the visits one by one).

It won’t matter either way. Place files only get imported when there’s TimelineItem files that depend on the Place. So if no TimelineItem files reference the place, its file will just get ignored.

6

Hope to see some in-app feature someday. Various commercial or city locations may have multiple entries and I may have selected
other ones in the past. Some way to merge and or mass edit would be great.