users: actions fail due to unlocking errors when clicking too fast

[martinpitt]

The users page does not serialize or retry actions when doing lots of things in quick succession. This particularly affects our tests, check-accounts often fails with various errors. The associated screen shots say why:

On other pages our approach is generally that we disable UI actions while an activity runs. This provides proper serialization and should work here as well.

[martinpitt]

@stefwalter : FYI, this is the issue we talked about last week. I'll see to talk someone into fixing this :)

[as-rawat]

I'd like to fix it! I don't even know where to start... It'll be great if you could provide some pointers 👶

[martinpitt]

@as-rawat : Nice! It shouldn't be too difficult actually. If you want to give it a stab, here are some notes which hopefully help. Also, if you want to work on this, I strongly recommend reading Working on your local machine so that you can develop on Cockpit with fast iteration cycles.

For an old jquery/plain JavaScript page like users, disabling/enabling an element happens through the disabled property; the users page code already does that plenty of times, like this:

$('#my_element_id').prop('disabled', true);

So the exercise is to change change_role(), change_real_name() and all other functions to disable all UI elements before the cockpit.spawn (which calls things like passwd) and re-enable them again after spawn finishes.

Of course this should not disable every button/link individually, that would be laborius, error prone, and hard to maintain. It should work to disable a parent element which includes them all. My first guess would be #account-details.

It could also be that the tests need updating, to wait until elements become enabled again. (I'm happy to help with that).

[as-rawat]

Thanks for pointers! I think, I'm not getting a perfect picture of what's happening here... but I think...
The bug is:
-users is able to trigger activities even when an activity is already running which affects tests and fails.
What I have to do is:
-Install cockpit
-When a user starts an activity(cockpit.swamp) disable everything on the page(DOM or a parent element) till its completed and then re-enable it.

Please correct me! 😕

[martinpitt]

@as-rawat : You've got it right. 👍

[martinpitt]

@as-rawat: Do you still want to work on this? If not, I'd hand this to someone else, as it's one of our most annoying causes of test flakes.

[as-rawat]

@martinpitt Sorry for not giving any details. I would like to work on it but wasn't able to cuz I was giving few interviews and searching for the jobs.