1428254 - Deleting selected events from main calendar view needs confirmation with opt-out, or inline notification with immediate undo option

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Calendar :: General, defect, P2)

Description

[John Hardin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170311150239

Steps to reproduce:

1. Select/highlight one or more calendar events from a local calendar
2. Right-click on one
3. Accidentally click the "Delete" option in the context menu (intended to click something else)
4. Poof! Gone!
5. Hit ^Z, look for Undo, curse


Actual results:

All highlighted calendar events disappeared without confirmation.

Unable to undo the Delete and recover them.


Expected results:

Display confirmation prompt dialog like "Are you sure you want to delete these calendar events? Y/N". (Potentially prompt only if more than one event is selected.)

Support ^Z or Edit->Undo to undo the delete and restore the event(s). (Don't need to remember a history of changes, because it's pretty apparent right away what happened.)

Comment 1

[musicant]

I'm a heavy keyboard user, and this bug drives me crazy. It happens to me because I've clicked on "New Event" in the Today Pane on the right, and created an event. I then forget that this has happened, and hit the delete key, thinking I'm deleting the current email (which is still highlighted!). The event is then deleted. Even worse, in addition to know confirmation, I sometimes don't even notice it happen because I'm not even looking at the calendar! I discover weeks later that accidentally deleted something.

Is there any other workaround apart from just turning off the Today Pane?

Comment 2

[luckyluke]

I can confirm this behavior, also on Linux. The same happens for tasks, and I've lost some information, when the focus was accidentally on TB/Lightning.

Comment 3

[eric.esser]

Subscribing.

Comment 4

[James]

Just ran into this one now. Deleted a calendar item because mistook it for another one that was worded close to it. Now I have no idea what I deleted, nor have the ability to get it back. That's going to eat at me as I am sure it was something important that I was supposed to remember...

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

The Undo part of this bug has been fixed by bug 1337356. That's good for ux-error-recovery. However, as comment 1 and a number of other comments on related bugs have pointed out, you may never notice accidental deletion in the first place, then undo won't help.

So I believe that we still need a confirmation prompt for deleting selected events in the main calendar view for ux-error-prevention.
Also ux-consistency: Ironically, we currently warn if you explicitly click Delete button inside a single event, but if you select 10 events in main calendar and press Delete believing you'll delete just one (or accidentally), 10 events will just silently go away.
We also prompt for similar scenarios like deleting addresses.

Perhaps ux-error-prevention could be covered with an inline notification with undo option directly after deleting events - maybe roughly the same amount of work compared to prompt with opt-out.

Morphing this to cover the ux-error-prevention part.

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I agree this should have a prompt.

Comment 8

[Lasana Murray]

Being prompted each time you attempt to delete an event from the calendar views when you have lots of events on your calendar is likely to be annoying. Should this be hidden behind some kind of pref?

Comment 9

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

A "don't ask me again" check box should do the job.

Comment 10

[John Hardin]

(In reply to Lasana Murray from comment #8)

Being prompted each time you attempt to delete an event from the calendar views when you have lots of events on your calendar is likely to be annoying. Should this be hidden behind some kind of pref?

...you mean a prompt for each one separately if you select a hundred events and context-menu->Delete like in the repro?

No, of course not; a single confirmation dialog like "You are about to delete ### events. [OK] [CANCEL]" would be sufficient.

If you're not multi-selecting a bunch first, then a mouseclick-[Delete]-[Enter] rhythm is easy to get into.

(In reply to Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan) from comment #9)

A "don't ask me again" check box should do the job.

It should not remember that past the current session, unless that appears in the config menus so that you can re-enable the confirmation dialog again.

Comment 11

[John Hardin]

Still pending after four years. :( I'm glad I'm no longer using TB+Lightning to do timekeeping...

Comment 12

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

"don't ask me again" we have for many dialogs, so yes just that, with a pref.
I can't see how deleting events would be an operation people do very often, so probably there's not much annoyance about confirming for the cases where one does it.

Comment 13

[Lasana Murray]

Attachment: Bug 1428254 - Prompt user before deleting items from calendar views and trees. r=darktrojan

Comment 14

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/bf916002d4a6
Prompt user before deleting items from calendar views and trees. r=darktrojan

Comment 15

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Verified fixed using Thunderbird 93.0b2 on Windows 10.