My initial guess is to have the clients read these directly and only update Barista's during movement (which should be the default anyways).

The three parts of correct handling.

Reading

• when opening a model, if "current" information information is not available from barista, use the information in the hint-layout-x, etc.

Use

• moment-to-moment information comes from barista
• during a complete redraw, may fall back on Reading

Writing

• as part of the "save" batch, the manager should
  • add all currently held node location information as annotations
  • tag that on first before adding "save" to batch

Whoops, @hdietze still had "layout-hint-" and I was using "hint-layout-"--funs errors bubbled up (see: geneontology/minerva#6 (comment)).

@hdietze has fixed the upstream issues that were discovered during the fix of geneontology/minerva#6.

The solution for this is all in the client code--no special support on the sever except for the delicate handling of the "hint-layout-*" strings.

In the future, we could implement uniqueness on the server to make things a little easier on the client, but have not done so yet, and will not unless it becomes a frustration.

x/y coordinate mixup.