662235 - Authentication dialogs do not show account/Lightning origin

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: Internal Components, defect)

Description

[Peets]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.10

When Lightning has an authentication problem, it pops up a dialog box asking for user name/password.  However, it (a) does not identify which account this is for and (b) does not identify that this request is for Lightning, so for users that don't use Lightning this often this looks like a spurious Thunderbird problem they cannot resolve.  This is especially a problem when using multiple accounts on the same server.  It would thus be nice if the authentication request popup had at least the word "Calendar" or Lightning" in the title to distinguish it from TB's popups..

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Change authentication on server, and correct it in Thunderbird
2. Wait (for users who forgot they installed Lightning)
3. Will automatically show up on failed login - try telling it apart from a Thunderbird authentication..

Actual Results:  
As you have no idea for which account it is (assuming you have multiple), you will either enter the correct combination (at which point the problem can go away with a ticked "save password" box) or you will enter the wrong parameters so it keeps coming back..

Expected Results:  
It should give me enough details to establish that it's (a) Lightning and not TB which pops this up and (b) should identify which specific calendar the auth request refers to (maybe default calendar names to login passwords ?).

This is more a usability failure - the code performs as expected once you have figured this out (took me weeks as I don't use Lightning that often).

Comment 1

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

Has this been the case for a while, or only since the checkin for bug 349641?

Comment 2

[Peets]

I have no theory as to why the calendar lost its stored authentication details in the first place, bug 349641 could very well apply.

However, my comment is that the lack of information offered at the time of authentication makes it difficult to impossible to identify where this request comes from (and thus what data needs entering).  It is thus a separate issue.

Comment 3

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

Oh wait, you said this happens with 1.0b2, so the bug I mentioned is not applied yet. On the one hand I agree the calendar information should be part of the auth dialogs, but this is again the same chicken/egg problem as with bug 247486: The server should advertise a different realm per calendar, if at all possible. This would fix the issue.

I'm confirming this bug though, if there is a way we can fix this in Lightning, then we should.

Comment 4

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Attachment: Confusing calendar authentication dialog

The dialog doesn't give enough information to which calendar it's asking.

Proposal:
* Dialog title:
  Calendar Authentication Required

* Dialog text:
  A username and password are being requested by xxxxxxx for the calendar <calendar name>.
(And forget about "The site says: ".......")

Comment 5

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Attachment: Mail dialog is clear enough

I agree with Peets that calendar auth dialog isn't clear (cf my previous attached image).  But I don't think it's necessary for mail auth dialog to change whatsoever.  Its dialog title is clearly written as

Mail Server Password Required

Comment 6

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

I think platform could be changed to All & All