Can the File Picker dialog be 'force refreshed'?

AnthonyB

A small inconvenience I often run into while adding/updating tracks and lyrics on multiple Songs in ST4 on iOS is that the 'File Picker' dialog (I assume in developer speak it is the UIDocumentPickerViewController?) can become 'stale' and stop refreshing. I often see this after 6+ sets of updates in one session and the only solution I've found is to force close ST4 and re-open it.

From what I've researched, this is not uncommon, and the behaviour can vary by source, i.e. the location of the files and the app provider that iOS is communicating with to get them (e.g. iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.)

In my specific case, I use Microsoft OneDrive as a means of getting files (audio tracks, lyrics text files) from my PC over to my iPads.
I can sit there with the OneDrive app open, force refresh it so that I can see the new file, and even open the new file, but in ST4 the file picker (even if opened and closed) doesn't refresh. When this happens, I force close ST4, re-open it, and this forces the File Picker to refresh, and then I continue on.

So, to be clear, this is not a ST issue. This, from my research, is an iOS behaviour of 'lazy' refreshing (done, understandably, to reduce processing effort/power consumption/etc.) combined with the variability of the app providers 'talking to' iOS and that it seems iOS can't 'force' the cloud app to 'engage'.

I thought I'd raise this in case there are any mechanisms @peter could implement to minimize the impact of this iOS+cloud app behaviour.

Now, I'm not an iOS developer so take my 'research' with a grain of salt as we know AI is not up-to-date or reliable 🙂

AI advises that there are no formal API for app developers to use to force the iOS file browser to refresh. It does suggest that a workaround the developers do use is "Dismissing and re‑presenting the picker forces the system to rebuild the UI from scratch. This is the closest thing to a “refresh,” though it’s user‑visible."

Whether "user-visible" is noticeably bad, or adds a few seconds to the operation (undesirable if it occurs every time), isn't clear.

So, @peter , is there anything that can be done to help mitigate this iOS behaviour from within ST4 that doesn't have over-riding disbenefits?

peter

The file picker is an iOS component that I can only display. What it does internally is not adjustable by me in any way. So unfortunately this is something I can't influence. Using my own file picker is also out of the option because that would limit access to the sandboxed files within the app. Only the official file picker allows access to files outside of the app.