# Tracking Modified Resources

**URL:** https://discourse.kitware.com/t/tracking-modified-resources/138
**Category:** Design
**Created:** [August 9, 2018, 9:22pm UTC](https://discourse.kitware.com/t/tracking-modified-resources/138 "2018-08-09T21:22:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Bob\_Obara](https://discourse.kitware.com/user_avatar/discourse.kitware.com/bob_obara/32/37_2.png) [@Bob\_Obara](https://discourse.kitware.com/u/Bob_Obara)
#### Post date: [August 9, 2018, 9:22pm UTC](https://discourse.kitware.com/t/tracking-modified-resources/138/1 "2018-08-09T21:22:17Z")

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Going through the issue tracker I can across one that I had added - the ability to know if an attribute resource was modified since it was loaded from or saved to disk.

I was thinking how this could be done and wanted to bounce around a couple ideas.

The simplest would be to have a modified property on the resources (in fact maybe all resources would have this property). All modification methods could mark the resource modified. The issues related to this approach would include:

- When reading in the resource from disk or stream would generate a lot of modified calls. One way of possibly getting around this would be to provide an optional flag in the modification calls (or provide a duplicate interface that would not call the modified method on the attribute resource)

- It may not be a single hop to get to the model resource - for example an item or item definition may have to go several levels to reach the attribute resource.

- Some transient attribute resources may not what to track this and will get hit by the overhead.

Any ideas?