Aeon Timeline 3 Not Seeing Past Root Level Character Folder

Q & A
#1

I just set up syncing between Aeon Timeline 3 and Scrivener 3 (Windows). I was able to add in the characters and locations syncing folders easily, but while Aeon Timeline is able to see/sync all my locations – even those within folders/subfolders – it’s not pulling in anything other than my character documents and folders in the root level of my \Characters\ folder.

As a result, I have 6-7 characters total (which in fact are groups of character types within Scrivener), with no way of expanding these groups to access the characters underneath.

While playing with the sync settings I may have found a clue. When I select the ‘Add Folder’ option and point to my characters folder in Scrivener, Aeon Timelines isn’t expanding that folder in the fly-out menu. It’s literally only showing the Characters folder and nothing else. This makes me think that Aeon Timeline can’t see anything under the character documents sitting inside my root-level \Characters\ folder. In other words, it’s less a syncing issue and more a visibility issue.

Any ideas? There isn’t much to adjust in the sync settings and I don’t understand why the app wouldn’t see the child objects.

Thanks,
Bob

#2

Hmmm…weird. I removed and re-added the sync again (the third time, I believe) and this time the Characters fly-out appeared. And everything synced. Now my parent documents are character groups and documents are characters, exactly as I wanted.

I have no idea what the issue was, but it seems to be working now.

Thanks,
Bob

#3

Okay, last post (hopefully :slight_smile: ).

While the syncing is working now, I noticed that if – within Scrivener – I have a document that syncs as a character in Aeon Timelines, and then I add a new character document underneath that document in Scrivener, Aeon Timelines doesn’t sync the child document over at all. Furthermore it doesn’t convert the parent document into a character group.

This is odd behavior in my opinion, especially since I can change entries from characters to character groups within Aeon Timelines and then sync those into Scrivener…I just can’t do it the other way around.

Is this by design?

Thanks,
Bob

#4

Okay, I think I finally figured it out.

If I add new child documents under existing documents on the Scrivener side, Aeon Timelines won’t sync them over as new characters unless I first manually change the parent character in aeon Timelines to a character group. Only then do the new child characters show up.

The only oddity here is that if I change the character group back to a character on the Aeon Timeline side, the child characters don’t disappear again. Instead, they become entries in a flat list alongside the parent character. Still, they sync, and will disappear out of Scrivener if I delete them out of Aeon Timelines (haven’t tried it the other way around yet).

Anyway, I’m gonna stop messing with this now since I don’t want to break my data. But at least I know how to handle this now.

-Bob

#5

Hi Bob,

I’m glad that you managed to get your syncing working the way that you want.
For future reference, what may have happened in the first instance is that you set your Characters to sync as a flat list, instead of a nested structure. This is an option that you select when setting up your sync settings. If it is set to a flat list, it just looks at the types in the root folder, not at anything in further levels down. If you had this set initially, but then when you tried to sync again you changed it, this might explain why you were able to sync the nested structure the next time.

In regards to syncing nested structures and adding new characters to sync, this is also something that is setup in the sync settings. You can choose what types in Scrivener (eg. folder or document) to sync to what types (eg. Character Group or Character) in Aeon Timeline, and on what nested levels this applies to. However Scrivener does not know if what it is syncing is a Character Group or Character, so you are unable to change it from one to another and sync it across to Aeon Timeline. You have to manually set up your folder/document structure alongside the sync settings to represent your Character Group/Character nesting. If something doesn’t match the structure needed in Aeon Timeline, then it ignores it.

In your case, it sounds like you nested a document within a document, and Aeon Timeline esd set up to see documents as characters when syncing. A character within a character doesn’t make sense in regards to Aeon Timeline, therefore it would ignore the second one added (it could be notes about the character or something like that). It doesn’t assume if you start nesting that the top document is a Character Group. Instead you would have to either convert what you want as Character Groups to folders first, or change your sync settings to say which level is the Character Group or which one is the Character.

This article also explains the sync settings and how they relate to Character/Character Group syncing: Sync Settings - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base

Hopefully this helps you understand a bit more of what happened and will help in the future.