1401767 - If you are logged out of phonebook, and perform a search, it gives you no results

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webtools Graveyard :: Phonebook, defect)

Description

[Guillaume Destuynder [:kang] [this account is no longer active]]

Attachment: XHR wrapper demo

Issue:
When you leave a web browser page/tab open with phonebook - such as https://phonebook.mozilla.org/tree.php - and leave the page alone until the Auth0/SSO session expire (say a day), then come back to it and try to search - nothing happens.

This is because phonebook is doing an XHR (ie background/xmlhttprequest) request and gets back an authentication prompt which it does not know what to do with (302), instead of the expected data.

While you can also fix that in code, I also wrote a wrapper in js that forces a page reload when that happens, which lets the user re-authenticate (in hope that it makes it easy to fix).

I'm attaching a POC with the wrapper function (called XMLHttpRequest(function(xhr)...) that has to be inserted somewhere in the page (it can be called as a file such as xhr_fixup.js for CSP reasons, of course). This will wrap all XHR calls and magically fix them all.

Hope this helps!

Comment 2

[Guillaume Destuynder [:kang] [this account is no longer active]]

Attachment: XHR wrapper demo

Noticed there was a stray "XMLHttpRequest" in the code, confusing. Removed it.

Comment 3

[:Atoll]

With this fixup in place, is the user-initiated action that resulted in the non-200 XHR eventually displayed to the user post-SSO? For instance, "clicked on a user in org tree", or "searched for a term", or etc.

Comment 4

[Guillaume Destuynder [:kang] [this account is no longer active]]

@comment3 : No, I don't believe so, unless Phonebook supports this (which I believe it does not support).
Basically, all it does is obey the HTTP code (such as 302 when you need to login again, which sends you to the main page of Phonebook once logged in).

Comment 5

[:Atoll]

Hmm. Well, at least it's the same before and after.

Comment 6

[:Atoll]

On the phonebook master branch (not yet deployed anywhere), this now displayed an error and asks you to click-to-reload, using the $.ajax(complete:) handler to trap and detect errors. I'll test again when that's live, but we might not need this.

Comment 7

[:Atoll]

Could you please verify whether this still occurs on stage (phonebook.allizom)?

Comment 8

[Guillaume Destuynder [:kang] [this account is no longer active]]

this technically works - however, the UX is a little odd:
if you're scroll down the org tree on https://phonebook.allizom.org/tree.php for example and click something here, you won't see the reload message because it appears at the top of the page (with a broken image link as well).

Comment 9

[:Atoll]

It should have scrolled. I'll work on it. Thanks.

Comment 10

[:Atoll]

Scrolling fixed, this will go live in staging today at some point.

Comment 11

[:Atoll]

Live in staging, verified with various auth breakages here. This will be deployed to production along with other fixes in the future.