Log Record Lifecycle

What a Journal Log record is, which records accept in-place text and time edits, and how the day timeline offers them.

Details

A Log record is a native Journal item representing something that already happened. It sits on the day timeline alongside plans and calendar events, and unlike a Running Note it is not working material the user is still shaping.

Which records accept an edit

Editing a record in place changes content, so the surface offers it only where the content authority permits it. A record this surface authored accepts an edit of its exact text and of its occurrence time, plus a delete. A record whose content authority lies elsewhere, whether carried over from the file-backed Journal or produced by a generator, accepts neither.

The decision reads three facts together: the record's authority kind, its exact text, and its numeric revision. A producer that omits any of them yields a record the surface treats as not editable, so a producer that means a record to be editable carries all three. That includes fixture producers, which model the same contract as the live one so a demo exercises the real gate rather than a weaker one.

A read-only day offers neither action, regardless of authority.

What an edit changes

Text and occurrence time change together in one write. The occurrence time is the record's own position in the day, so correcting it moves the record within that day's ordering rather than leaving it filed under the moment it was typed. A corrected time is bounded by the window of the day the record belongs to.

The write asserts the record's numeric revision, so a stale client conflicts instead of overwriting a newer edit, and a client mutation identifier makes a retry idempotent. Replaying the same identifier with different content or a different time is a conflict rather than a silent divergence.

Why a record with no available action still says something

A record that can offer neither action renders an explanation rather than an empty menu or a control that dispatches nowhere. Buttons that resolve to nothing read as breakage, and an empty surface reads as a rendering fault, so the record states why it cannot be changed here.

See journal/running-note-lifecycle, journal/source-backed-capture, journal/day-lifecycle, and services/dashboard/react/calendar-surface.