Loading failures negatively impact UX
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- Dominant language
- JavaScript
- Stars
- 146
- Forks
- 21
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Description
When navigating around my pod, logging out, logging in, viewing things I have in my storage I receive an abrupt message about my resource failing to load. There are different cases when this happens.
Cases where 401/403 Issues arise
- Logging Out -
error: Failed to load https://www.solidcommunity.net/ Fetcher: https://www.solidcommunity.net/ status: 401
should happen: I would not like to see this error, instead it could say something (not in red), you are logged out. Or it could just show the menu. - Logging in - right away when I log in I get an error
error: Failed to load https://www.solidcommunity.net/ Fetcher: https://www.solidcommunity.net/ status: 403
should happen: I should not get an error, maybe it should navigate to the home screen when this happens, although what if you log in while you are looking at another resource you would want to redirect. So logging in from the "home" should be detected somehow and accordingly you should be displayed something specific. - From storage I click on the link icon next to the file name, takes me to the file (I'm logged in already). I receive 2 errors
errors: Error reading file: Error: Web error: 401 on GET of https://sstratsianis.solidcommunity.net/formtest.ttl and below it Failed to load https://sstratsianis.solidcommunity.net/formtest.ttl Fetcher: https://sstratsianis.solidcommunity.net/formtest.ttl status: 401
when I go through the link below I don't have the same problem, it goes directly to the resource with no failed to load errors. I believe this is the "about" pane. need to find it in solid-panes.
Technical details
- Logout We could redirect to a known public page before reload, or skip GotoSubject when URL is app root and unauthenticated. here is the spot
- Login Same spot as above. We could at bare root, open the user profile or perhaps storage when logged in, and otherwise skip root fetch.
- File Loading Errors After research I believe the only way to solve this is storing cookies or looking through all the links and passing authSession in (need to look at this again and why it's not a good option for production). We can't store auth in cookies because it's not safe. But, we could change the message to be more directed to user. To change the error message style we can do that here
Changes we could make are shown in this PR here
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at src/mainPage/index.ts around the GotoSubject handling for login, logout, and the app root, then inspect src/outline/manager.js around line 2109 for resource-load error presentation. Review the referenced PR 575 and reproduce the three reported 401/403 cases. Done means the relevant navigation and file-loading flows no longer show abrupt errors and instead present the intended authenticated or logged-out experience.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- javascript
- Domain
- authentication, frontend
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100