Syndesis: API provider integration details page shows tons of notifications for an imported integration

[dongniwang]

This is a...

[ ] Feature request
[ ] Regression (a behavior that used to work and stopped working in a new release)
[x] Bug report  
[ ] Documentation issue or request

The problem

This is still a WIP feature but just wanted to open this issue to track the behavior of inline notifications.

As shown in the screenshot, on an API provider integration details page, we're showing tons of inline notifications. Users have to scroll ~ 3 times to get to the main content of the page.

@riccardo-forina mentioned that this behavior only happens to an imported integration. If create an API provider integration from scratch, then we don't see this. And it seems like this only happens to integration that was published at some point.

Expected behavior

Short term: maybe we can do something from the UX/UI side to group the notifications or have some kind of mechnism to magically show them upon user's request.

Long term: need a more sustainable solution to show notifications. Maybe notification drawer? https://www.patternfly.org/pattern-library/communication/notification-drawer/

Screenshot

Tasks involved / Steps to Reproduce

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cc: @lburgazzoli @nicolaferraro @gashcrumb @syndesisio/uxd

[gashcrumb]

Looks like basically a bulletin is created for each flow in the integration, could be because each of those has a connection (the API provider) and it's being reported for each flow that a connection in that flow needs to be updated. So yeah, probably we could de-dupe these bulletins if the connection associated with them has already been posted to the integration? Will post a screenshot of the data too.

[gashcrumb]

Here's (some of) the data driving those notifications:

[gashcrumb]

We could de-dupe client-side but I dunno, I think it'd make sense not to let all these messages get posted.

[gashcrumb]

Long term: need a more sustainable solution to show notifications. Maybe notification drawer? https://www.patternfly.org/pattern-library/communication/notification-drawer/

I don't think the notification drawer is a good fit for this type of notification, that's better served for asynchronous notifications that can also be ignored by the user.

[dongniwang]

Just to make it clear, so this is _NOT_ related "Connection configuration required"?

What's the user action needed here? Edit the integration then publish the integration?

[gashcrumb]

That's actually a great question, I'm not exactly sure what these bulletins represent, maybe they shouldn't be getting generated in the first place, @lburgazzoli WDYT?

[lburgazzoli]

do you have an export I can test?

On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 at 19:14, Stan Lewis [e-mail] wrote:

That's actually a great question, I'm not exactly sure what these
bulletins represent, maybe they shouldn't be getting generated in the first
place, @lburgazzoli https://github.com/lburgazzoli WDYT?

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[gashcrumb]

@lburgazzoli here you go: Swagger.Petstore-export.zip

[lburgazzoli]

The warnings are highlighting that your integration is outdated which is effectively true as the exported integration comes from a version of syndesis built before some fixes introduced this week on the backend side to make API providers generated integration working with Data Mapper.

Among other things, the fix introduces some "customizers" at connector definition level that were not present before thus the warnings are generated.

If you create a new integration with the current version of syndesis or edit the imported one, then the next export/import should not generate the warning anymore.

We can eventually filter the generated board for error of the same type, however you wouln'd know which among of the flows is the impacted one.

[gashcrumb]

Makes sense, thanks for clarifying!

I suspect if we've the possibility of lots of notifications like this then yes @dongniwang we should consider how this affects the page design, at the very least we could probably have a max height on the container for those inline notifications so we can prevent the entire page from being so tall, or just truncate it to 'n' inline notifications with a 'more' link that expands the container element.

[dongniwang]

Thanks for clarifying @lburgazzoli and @gashcrumb!

Yeah, I agreed that we need to have a better way of handling lots of notifications. Initially, I thought this could only happen to API provider integration, but really for any integration with multiple connections, there's a chance this would happen.

Setting a max height is good, and perhaps also having a collapsed/expand control to display those notifications when needed. I'll open a new issue for exploring UX design on this.

Back to this problem:

What's the user action needed here? Edit the integration then publish the integration?

So all users need to do is to publish this integration for it to pick up the updates?

[gashcrumb]

So all users need to do is to publish this integration for it to pick up the updates?

Yeah, I think so...

[phantomjinx]

@gashcrumb @dongniwang
Publishing will not fix the notifications, editing the integration then saving the integration should.
This was the kind of noise that I thought might occur. Trouble is as well is the messages dont tell you which connection or which part of the connection is not equivalent. I can look at gleaning that out if you like?

@lburgazzoli

[dongniwang]

Trouble is as well is the messages dont tell you which connection or which part of the connection is not equivalent.

Agreed! Users just see a tons of notifications in the exact same wording without telling me how they can fix it... And there's also no way to close these notifications.

[heiko-braun]

@dongniwang What would you recommend from your point if view? Have you verified the recent changes and do they improve the situation?

[dongniwang]

@heiko-braun - I'm not able to reproduce the issue so can't say I've verified the updates. I'm fine with closing this one if the investigation was already done by @phantomjinx and open another issue to track UX design for this. Thanks!

[heiko-braun]

@dongniwang Sounds good, let's do it this way.

[KurtStam]

Follow the README:
https://github.com/syndesisio/syndesis-quickstarts/tree/master/api-provider
or simply watch the video on how to reproduce it.

[heiko-braun]

@dongniwang can you try @KurtStam 's suggestion above?

[gashcrumb]

I can't reproduce it with the original export since @phantomjinx's PR. I've also tried importing the quickstart here (am running on a build I did yesterday) and it doesn't show those notifications as shown in Kurt's video.

@KurtStam sorry to say you may want to re-do that video after the release next week, but at least there'll be more icons and less warning notifications :-)

[heiko-braun]

Thanks Stan. I am going to close this.