Additional failure status codes for WOPI operations

[juliushaertl]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

When a wopi operation like saving the file fails, there is currently no possibility to give an error message or more detailed information to the user. The integrator can just return a limited list of HTTP status codes, but there are some cases where it would be befinicial if we could report more details to the user so they know why saving has failed.

This came up in https://github.com/nextcloud/richdocuments/issues/3281

Some examples could be:

• The user quota on the storage exceeded
• Storage is temporarily unavailable (e.g. because the file is on a remote Nextcloud instance that currently is in maintenance mode)
• The file lacks write permissions (while it was there when the document was opened, Nextcloud has different mechanisms where the permission may be changed in the meantime by an admin or another user)
• The file is temporarily locked by another process
• There may be others

Describe the solution you'd like

For some cases it would be good to have a defined status code where Collabora could then suggest the user to download a copy of the file to avoid loosing changes (if quarantine is not enabled or to avoid admins needing to go grab the file from there)

https://github.com/nextcloud/richdocuments/blob/4cb127a868e8b6e8edc3a39c1a5b78eb94c68916/lib/Controller/WopiController.php#L482

https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/blob/52a039e832872ad296387ef71bb1101c3b21d2a2/wsd/Storage.hpp#L318-L321

We could extend this list with common known errors.

In addition it would also be great to still have something like a COOLStatusMessage field in the response that integrators can send and is then displayed to the user in the error message when saving fails.

Describe alternatives you've considered

None

Additional context

None

[Ashod]

Some of these are already supported by the WOPI protocol and supported (with proper message to the user):

• The user quota on the storage exceeded
  • Storage returns HTTP 413 (Too Large), user sees "Save failed because the document is too large or exceeds the remaining storage space. The document will now be read-only but you may still download it now to preserve a copy locally." (or the equivalent translation).
• Storage is temporarily unavailable (e.g. because the file is on a remote Nextcloud instance that currently is in maintenance mode)
  • Storage returns 500 error (or the equivalent), user sees "Document cannot be saved, please check your permissions." (or the equivalent translation. This can be improved.)
• The file lacks write permissions (while it was there when the document was opened, Nextcloud has different mechanisms where the permission may be changed in the meantime by an admin or another user)
  • Storage returns 401, 403, or 404 (UNAUTHORIZED), user sees "Document cannot be saved due to expired or invalid access token." (or the equivalent translation).
• The file is temporarily locked by another process
  • Identical to "Storage is temporarily unavailable" above.

We can extend these error-codes and have matching user-visible messages added. Similarly for other cases. We just need to choose sensible HTTP codes for each case and agree on them.

[juliushaertl]

Thanks @Ashod that sounds very reasonable. Then we could use those existing cases and in addition add a COOLStatusMessage to the json response of the wopi operations for integrator defined errors messages that should be shown in addition.

On a separate note: I've just tried returning a 413 and it seems that coolwsd is handling that properly but the frontend code base just switches over to readonly without showing any error.

[juliushaertl]

@pedropintosilva In addition, i think in case of a save failure it would be nice if we could improve the error message to directly offer to download a local copy to to avoid loosing any changes.

[Ashod]

returning a 413 and it seems that coolwsd is handling that properly but the frontend code base just switches over to readonly without showing any error

@pedropintosilva this sounds like a regression. Properly we need to only restore the message that notifies the user of the issue (the error message already says the document will be readonly. We just need to display it (for some reason this._map.fire('warn', {msg: storageError}); is not working properly, I guess).