apache / apache/couchdb

Warn users of impact when deleting a view via Fauxton

Open
#5,125 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Erlang
Stars
7k
Forks
1.1k
Avg merge
1d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
9

Description

## Summary

Fauxton allows one to easily delete a view. If they do, then *all* views will be rebuilt. That might be sensible behavior if one were to think about how design documents work, but it's not obvious behavior. If you have several large views and delete one to reduce your storage requirements, all the rest will become unavailable until they're rebuilt. For large databases, this might take days. In that sense, being able to easily delete views is a giant footgun.

My team and I found this the hard way out a couple of months ago and it cost us.

## Desired Behaviour

To us it would make sense for some friction to be introduced in the UX when a change with potential catastrophic impact is made. Ideally, we would have liked to have been warned about views being rebuilt and the potential for downtime.

The above assumes that making it so that one could delete one view without rebuilding the others is too effortful to consider. It would otherwise be the ideal behavior.

## Possible Solution

Something as simple as an alert, explaining that other views would have to be rebuilt, causing downtime, would suffice.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start in Fauxton's view-deletion flow and trace what happens when a view is removed. The change is done when the UI warns that deleting a view rebuilds the other views and may cause downtime before the user confirms.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
databases, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.