Brainstorming - "Snapshotting" a State Tiddler Sequence

[pmario]

@TW_Tones

Why would we want to maintain state changes in large TOC’s?

• To save and restore the state for a large complex TOC
• To identify and open the last TOC expanded
• To alter the appearance of recently selected
• To be able to playback all expand/collapse activities just now using modified today

This make me wonder if a few simple tweaks in the TOC and other macros and solutions with how we manage state tiddlers, it would permit additional features to be developed such as expand and collapse steps to a particular tiddler.

Perhaps another feature of custom TOC’s @pmario

I did think about a similar idea in context of the bunder plugin - State Snapshots

• The bundler allows us to configure state tiddlers, that should be snap shotted
• Currently such a snapshot can only be saved as a single JSON export file
• But I would want to save a sequence of snapshots

So the idea is to use Compound tiddlers to store snapshot data-tiddlers which contain the states similar to .multids

The Compound tiddler can store several data-tiddlers in 1 compound tiddler. That’s tiddler inception, which can be exported in a single file.

The cool thing is. The “snapshotted” tiddler could be $:/StoryList, which could open and close different tiddlers in a sequence.

eg:

title: Compound Sequence 
type: text/vnd.tiddlywiki-multiple

Content

title: snapshot-2026-02-27-10:00.123
type: application/x-tiddler-dictionary

$:/state/toc/TableOfContents-Welcome--232442599: open
$:/state/toc/TableOfContents/Welcome-HelloThere--232442599: open

+
title: snapshot-2026-02-27-10:01.234
type: application/x-tiddler-dictionary

$:/state/toc/TableOfContents-Welcome--232442599: close
$:/state/toc/TableOfContents/Welcome-HelloThere--232442599: open

The compound tiddler can be imported into a new wiki. What’s missing is a bundler extension, that can play the sequence.

Since the TW UI is 100% state driven, everything is possible.

Just brainstorming

[TW_Tones]

Great taking the idea even further, I think the ability to give a filter, for example in my original example using a state tiddlers prefix, that simply puts all resulting tiddlers in a compound tiddler, would be a useful and also independentlt useful tool. This makes me ask should it be reduced to the snapshot data entries when you can just keep the whole tiddler?

Personally I value the automatic setting of all created and modified fields, including creator/modifier as these provide fundamental information, for sequencing and other as yet unimagined possibilities. So think this could be packed into the compound tiddlers, and move the snapshot title to the compound tiddler title (behind $:/). Personally I would just compound all found fields.

• We can then simplify the “play sequence” to the whole compound tiddler.
• This may also support use of the testcase widget and allow a test to be saved or reset.
• It would be trivial to store all current filtered states - Play a saved state set, then later restore the saved set.

I think there may be some powerful code patterns emerging here, personally I would like to keep the components features able to be used independently, generically or together to perform a particular function like saving and restoring a TOC, setting up a testcase, maintaining a content history, maintaining a copy/paste or MRU history etc…