The user experience of selecting beamline manager for a new experimental area is terrible

[ACLay]

What is the problem and why is it a problem

The user list for beamline manager selection shown when attempting to create a new experimental area is incredibly unpleasant to use. It's

• slow to load
• unordered
• only shows name so good luck picking correctly if multiple users have the same name
• seems to allow some level of typing to filter, but
  • doesn't remove non-matches
  • unintuitively puts the matches at the bottom of the list
  • but sometimes it doesn't and leaves some matches at the top
  • is slow to update as you type

Steps to reproduce (if it's a bug).

[ACLay]

I wonder if this is related to, and if so how much is due to #970

[Bhaswati1148]

The api getUsers is fetching the entire set of user's records (approx. more than 11.5k) from postgress database Although user role is passed but its never been used while querying the database.

The user numbers fetched from postgress is then used in getStfcBasicPeopleByUserNumbers Effectively two database calls with large set of users seems to be a probable cause for slow loading of the beam line manager drop down list.

[Bhaswati1148]

INSTRUMENT_SCIENTIST user role is passed from front end. If this is taken into consideration while querying the postgress database, only two records are fetched as of now. This seems a little weird in production. Discussed the situation with @ACLay and @srconway. We need to clarify from Emma Gozzard

• Are users with INSTRUMENT_SCIENTIST role only allowed in that list or should also include USER_OFFICER?
• Is beam line manager going to be changed frequently? if not, can this list be changed to a text field where an email can be used to choose a beamline manager?