jupyter / jupyter/notebook

Feature request: Tell user that "_xsrf" warnings mean saving didn't happen

Open
#5,205 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Jupyter Notebook
Stars
13.3k
Forks
5.8k
Avg merge
6d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

Description

I'd like to request a partial (hopefully easy) fix for an issue that's been reported before.

Sometimes the server has trouble communicating with the notebook page and a warning comes up. This warning has to do with some `_xsrf` field, and appears to mean that saving the notebook has failed. This doesn't seem that uncommon:

* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55014094/jupyter-notebook-not-saving-xsrf-argument-missing-from-post
* https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/4495
* https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/4092

Instead of having a little yellow message pop up in the logs and notebook header that says "'_xsrf' argument missing from POST", could there be a big red message that says "Something went wrong with saving"? Cause it really sucks when you lose a few hours of work late in the day.

It sounds like jupyter lab might already have this warning: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/3506.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reading the prior reports in issues 4495 and 4092 and the related JupyterLab issue 3506, then trace where the `_xsrf` warning appears in the notebook page, logs, and header. Done means a prominent red message clearly tells users that saving failed when this warning occurs.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
jupyter-notebook
Domain
frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
42/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.