Give immediate feedback when the user clicks the "Start transfer" button

[alexwlchan]

Expected behaviour When I click "Start transfer" in the dashboard, I get some immediate feedback to tell me that something is happening.

Current behaviour There's a long delay between clicking "Start transfer" and anything showing up to acknowledge anything is happening. It’s hard to tell if Archivematica is doing something, or if there's been a silent error and my transfer has been swallowed.

Steps to reproduce

1. Click "Start transfer".
2. Wait for something not to happen.

Your environment (version of Archivematica, operating system, other relevant details) I'm seeing this in our Archivematica instance at Wellcome (a forked version of 1.10.x). I also see this behaviour in the sandbox (none of my transfers are starting, and I can't work out why).

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[ross-spencer]

Slightly related @alexwlchan https://github.com/archivematica/Issues/issues/491 so there might be a few pieces missing to make the feedback as rich as you might like, but it would be a really nice enhancement, and if folks have thoughts ideas, that would be great.

[jorikvankemenade]

@alexwlchan thank you for raising this issue. I've had my fair share of annoyance about this one :). Just for my understanding, what kind of UX are you expecting here? What would be your perfect situation?

In the context of full disclosure. Usually, when my transfers don't start this is because of a problem in the MCP Server or the storage server. So by now, I am fully used to check the MCP Server logs or the storage logs and not the dashboard logs. However, it used to be that I would check the dashboard logs because "that made sense". Taking this one step further, and I think @ross-spencer mentions that in #491 as well, as a developer I am used to digging in logs and am sort of familiar with how Archivematica works. For a user, support, or sys-admin this might not be the case.

[alexwlchan]

Here’s a quick mockup of what might be nice: as soon as I click “transfer”, a row appears in the transfer dashboard with a UUID and a start time. No microservices yet, because none have been scheduled, but I can see the transfer has been acknowledged:

And:

Usually, when my transfers don't start this is because of a problem in the MCP Server or the storage server

Yep, me too. I’m currently setting up our deployment and break stuff fairly regularly, but I hope that won't be the case soon!

A single line in the dashboard with a timestamp would make debugging this easier if/when a user reports a problem. For example:

“I started a transfer this morning, and nothing happened.” “When this morning?” “Before lunch?” [scrolls through four hours of logs]

vs.

“I started transfer 02f5 this morning, and nothing happened.” “Ah, I see it in the transfer dashboard. 09:21. Let’s have a look.” [immediately checks logs]