internetarchive / internetarchive/openlibrary

Some homepage `custom_ia_carousel` components are failing to render

Open
#10,662 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Lead: @jimchamp Needs: Breakdown Needs: Investigation Priority: 3 Type: Bug
Dominant language
Python
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

### Problem

Some homepage carousels are failing to render, with `Unable to render this page` messages. This appears to only happen to `custom_ia_carousel` templates.

![Image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8d77311f-4257-40c7-80ce-7844cf84bb44)

![Image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8afcc206-ac56-412b-9e6e-1f84908f9c81)

### Reproducing the bug

1. Go to homepage
2. Do look at the carousels

* Expected behavior: All carousels are present
* Actual behavior: Some carousels are not rendered without error

Note that this is heppening intermittently. I had good luck reproducing this by changing the language until I observed an error. This helped me avoid restarting memcached every time the page loaded correctly.

### Context

- Browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc): Any
- OS (Windows, Mac, etc): Any
- Logged in (Y/N): No
- Environment (prod, dev, local): prod

### Breakdown

Ideally, all homepage carousels would be rendered each time the homepage was rendered. At the very least, an error message shouldn't be rendered when a carousel fails to be rendered properly.

#### Requirements Checklist
* [ ]

#### Related files

*

#### Stakeholders

*


#### Instructions for Contributors

- Please [run these commands](https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/wiki/Git-Cheat-Sheet#working-on-your-branch) to ensure your repository is up to date **before** [creating a new branch](https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/wiki/Git-Cheat-Sheet#making-changes-and-creating-a-pull-request) to work on this issue and **each time after** pushing code to Github, because the pre-commit bot may add commits to your PRs upstream.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start at the homepage and reproduce the intermittent failure by changing the language, focusing on the custom_ia_carousel templates. Trace why affected carousels show “Unable to render this page”; done means all homepage carousels render reliably without that error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
frontend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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