Lawmaker reporting that you already have the document open in another tab (but you haven't)

Lawmaker uses browser session data to determine if you already have a document open. This is to prevent you accidentally opening 2 or more copies of the same document and getting into versioning issues. On very rare occasions, this feature can create issues if your browser session didn’t update correctly. If this does happen to you, you will probably only be aware of it when you attempt to open a document and a yellow banner appears at the top of the document in the Editor saying “Document already open in another browser tab”. This page shows you how to get out of this situation, but do check first to see whether you do have the document open in another tab just in case!

There are 2 approaches outlined below depending on your levels of confidence:

1. Using Developer Tools to update your browser session information specifically for Lawmaker. The benefit of this targeted approach is that it will not impact other web applications you access in the same browser

2. Clearing cookies and other site data for all web applications (instructions for Chrome and instructions for Edge). The drawback of this approach is that it will log you out of other websites you might be using in the same browser.

How to use Developer Tools to update your browser session information

Edge & Chrome

1. Close down the Editor tab reporting that the document is already open.

2. Make sure focus is on the browser tab that has Lawmaker open and press F12 to open ‘DevTools’ (if it is the first time you’ve accessed Developer Tools, you might need to confirm that you wish to open Developer Tools at this point).

3. Select ‘Application’ from the upper tool bar if it’s not already selected:

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4. Look for opendocuments in the ‘Key’ column

5. Double click on the content in the ‘Value’ column to select it all and over-type with “[]“ (an open and close square bracket) so that it looks like this:

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6. Move your cursor out of this field and try opening the document again. You should find that the document opens in the Editor without the yellow banner.

7. You can close the Dev Tools window by clicking on the X in the top right hand corner:

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The screenshots above have been taken from Edge. Chrome looks more or less the same but there may be minor presentational differences from the screenshots that you are looking at above. The steps are all the same though.

How to clear cookies and other site data in Chrome

1. On your computer, open Chrome

2. At the top right, click More Settings (three dots stacked vertically)

3. Select More tools…

4. Select Clear browser data

5. In the pop-up dialog box, select Cookies and other site data

6. Click on Clear data button

Now you will have to re-logon to Lawmaker. Try opening the document again. You should find that the yellow banner has now disappeared.

Keyboard short cut which works in Chrome as well as Edge is Ctrl+Shift+Del which will open the dialog box that you see in the screenshots and is a quicker way to access this option.

How to clear cookies and other site data in Edge

1. On your computer, open Edge

2. At the top right, click More Settings (three dots displayed horizontally)

3. Select Settings

4. Select Privacy, search and services (from the left hand navigation)

5. Within the Clear browsing data section, within the Clear browsing data now option, click on Choose what to clear

6. In the pop-up dialog box, make sure you only select Cookies and other site data and then click on Clear now button

Now you will have to re-logon to Lawmaker. Try opening the document again. You should find that the yellow banner has now disappeared.