Portfolio Password Protect Bug

[Stefan]

Here is the scenario(which I already encountered twice):

I apply password protection on the whole portfolio.
When I try to opne FM, it shows me an investment (let's say MSFT) and ask me for the password.
If I type the password OK, everything is fine.
However, if I press Cancel instead of typing the password, it says soemthing like "Investment MSFT could not be opened".
Now, next time I try to open FM, it shows me another investment (let's say INTC) and asks for password.
Now, if I type the password, it opens FM andn everything seems fine... EXCEPT that my MSFT investment has disappeared from the portfolio. It is nowhere to be found.
Now, I was lucky I always make backup copies of FM database and could recover by replacing teh FM database with its backup.
My questions: is this a bug? (apparently it is a bug). And next question: is therea work around? Is there any way I could recover my investement if I type the wrong password or just press cancel and teh investement "is disappeared" from my portfolio?

[Mark]

Hi Stefan,

This isn't a bug. What is happening is that when you don't type in the right password (or Cancel), the investment is not opened. You probably have "Options / Save Portfolio on Exit" turned on, and when you exit, you are saving your portfolio without that investment. If you Cancel entering a password and don't want your portfolio saved this way, turn off "Options / Save Portfolio on Exit", and close the portfolio, or exit FM.

[Stefan]

Hi Mark,

I see what you are saying. However, this whole behaviour is quite unexpected - and some other users will get hurt by it, like I was. It looks like a very common occurence to me. Typing the wrong password and/or canceling should bring you to the initial state, where you are offered again the opportunity to type the password correctly or to exit the app.
In general, any application I know of, which is password protected, will allow you, immediately upon error detection, to re-enter the password, allowing you to recover from a typing error.
Not FM. With FM, if you are un-lucky to have set the option the save portfolio on exit (and, believe me, nobody will know that this "save portfolio on exit" option and password protection are so tightlly coupled), so if this option was set AND you mistype, BAM! the investment is gone and there is no way to recover it! It just disappears. And you may not know it, you discover its absence much later on, like I did.
I would have appreciated a more gracious recovery: I mis-type the password and FM tells me: Sorry, this is the wrong password, please try again OR cancel. And there will be no confusion and no investements which disappear. Is there a reason this could not be done?
In my case, I didn't even know that my investment disappeared but a week or so after it did. And I had no idea why it disappeared either, no FM clue to point to this. And I had to go back to a month old backup and work for an hour or so to re-record all my older transactions. And I had no recollection what I did to make that investment go away. ithought it may have been a FM spurious bug???
Anyway, I was tryingt o suggest a user frinedly way to deal with what I think is a frequent user behaviour - mistyped password. This will increase both the usability and the user confidence in FM (no more mysterious investemnt disappearences).

Thanks,
Stefan

[Mark]

Hi Stefan,

I agree you should have multiple opportunities to enter the password correctly, and I believe it does work that way now. If you mis-type a password, you will get a dialog that says "Incorrect Password. Try again?" with Yes/No buttons. Just press "Yes", and you can try again to enter the password. You can repeat this as many times as you want until you get the password correct. It does not just skip opening that first investment if you mis-type the password once. Are you not seeing this message box, or do you not consider that sufficient? Are you running an 11.x version?

[Stefan]

Hi Mark,

There is indeed the dialog box for mistyped password.

The problem I mentioned shows up only if you press Cancel. In my case, I wanted to open FM, then changed my mind and pressed Cancel. So, it just showed me a message that it could not open MSFT and exited.
This was the sequencetaht I now remember.
So, I was thinking I should be able to exit and close the app in this situation, where I don't want to type any password. But it won't let me do it. Once you try to open the app, you either type the correct password, or, if you try to cancel and close the app (and teh save option was set), you lose the investment which was shownto you when you tried to open the app.

[Mark]

Hi Stefan,

You can cancel opening the portfolio. On the password entry dialog, there are 4 buttons:

OK
Cancel
Cancel All
Help

If you press "Cancel" you will get a message stating that this investment was not opened, and it will move onto the next investment.

If you press "Cancel All", it will also give you a message that this investment was not opened, but then it will give you a second dialog saying:

Would you like to cancel opening the portfolio?

Click "Yes" to cancel opening the portfolio.
Click "No" to go ahead and open the portfolio without opening any more investments.

If you click Yes to this, it will do what you were looking to do, cancel opening the whole portfolio.

Maybe we should change the text of the "Cancel" button to something like "Skip"? That may help avoid the confusion that pressing "Cancel" will cancel opening the portfolio. You want to press "Cancel All" to do that.