Openrefine: Error contacting recon service: timeout : timeout - https://tools.wmflabs.org/openrefine-wikidata/en/api

[visch]

When reporting a bug please provide the following information to help reproduce the bug:

Version of OpenRefine used (Google Refine 2.6, OpenRefine2.8, an other distribution?):

Open Refine 3.0 beta

Operating Systems and version:

Windows 10

Browser + version used - Please note that OpenRefine doesn't support Internet Explorer but works OK in most cases:

Chrome

Steps followed to create the issue:

1. Clone git repo
2. run refine.bat build
3. run refine.bat
4. Import a file or two
5. Wait around, and you'll recieve js alerts with the message "Error contacting recon service: timeout : timeout - https://tools.wmflabs.org/openrefine-wikidata/en/api"

If you are allowed and are OK with making your data public, it would be awesome if you can include the data causing the issue or a URL pointing to where the data is (if your concerned about keeping your data private, ping us on our mailing list):

N/A

Current Results:

Javascript alert

Expected Results:

No javascript alert

[visch]

It's obviously tied to https://tools.wmflabs.org/openrefine-wikidata/en/api taking too long to respond, but OpenRefine probably should fail more gracefully or not have this url baked in? I'm not sure what the right solution is

[thadguidry]

@visch so you said you don't want a javascript alert. So you want no alerting at all and just silently timeout and leave you on the datagrid ? How is that useful to you ? Give us more details on how you imagine what OpenRefine would show you, or do, if the Wikidata API times out. Tell us how you want this designed, with step by step. Tell us how "fail more gracefully" would look like to you in OpenRefine ?

[ostephens]

I'm not sure why we use a javascript alert for this. Would it make more sense to alert within the page where we display other messages (such as the version check, or the reconciliation progress info)?

[sharun-s]

I haven't used openrefine in a while, and I just wanted to merge a few misspelled text fields in some data. Everything works fine but when I click "browse a cluster" in the cluster and edit page, it opens the cluster in a new tab. And in every new tab I get the pop up. It's quite annoying if I am browsing a bunch of clusters. Is there some configurable way to stop this request being made? I am not doing any recon stuff.Thanks

[wetneb]

That's because we try to add the recon service by default in the background - we should indeed not fail like this!