Stop "retrying" requests that fail in the main queue #8860

marcaaron · 2022-05-03T00:31:10Z

Details

Holding on:

Fixed Issues (Related to)

https://github.com/Expensify/Expensify/issues/208281

Tests

Block a the UpdateLastRead request that is triggered whenever a report is switched to (see tip here)
Navigate to a report while online
Verify that the request is not getting retried at all and doesn't throw any errors in the JS console

Verify that no errors appear in the JS console

PR Review Checklist

PR Reviewer Checklist

I verified the correct issue is linked in the ### Fixed Issues section above
I verified testing steps are clear and they cover the changes made in this PR
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- I verified the steps cover any possible failure scenarios (i.e. verify an input displays the correct error message if the entered data is not correct)
- I turned off my network connection and tested it while offline to ensure it matches the expected behavior (i.e. verify the default avatar icon is displayed if app is offline)
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QA Steps

Same as Tests

Verify that no errors appear in the JS console

Screenshots

❌

…ts - stop queueing read requests. watch many tests fail

marcaaron · 2022-05-04T22:41:21Z

Realizing that an interesting side effect of the original changes (now reverted) would be that all things are technically "retryable" and optimistic (but not persistent) and will not be optimistic anymore after.

We would be able to fix that by making any optimistic requests have a persist: true, but in the doc we decided this would be a gradual process. Report comments are the only thing that will work with this new system at the moment.

marcaaron · 2022-05-17T01:40:05Z

Gonna expand on this problem because on further reflection I don't think we can actually get rid of shouldRetry until all optimistic (but not persisted) actions are refactored over to the new API system being proposed in this thread.

We can still kill the "retry counter" logic though for things outside of the Sequential Queue.

Current behavior:

Write request (w/o persist: true) is made while we are offline
It goes into the main queue because we are offline and stays there because it’s “retryable” (actually all requests are retryable unless we specify that they are not)
Come back online and the main queue will process again (basically giving us the same “optimistic” behavior, but without the “persistance” that report comments have)

Gonna make those changes now so I can merge the good parts of this and wrap up the Network Improvements project as the retry logic is holding on the API changes.

marcaaron · 2022-05-17T02:40:00Z

@roryabraham adding you here to have a second set of eyes and my rambling comments above might be interesting to you

marcaaron · 2022-05-23T23:31:13Z

Bump

roryabraham · 2022-05-26T01:45:34Z

LGTM 👍

Leaving a brief summary to explain the reasoning for why we're making this change... Basically:

Requests that can be saved and retried later belong in the sequential (persisted) queue. Only writes fit in this category
If any other (non-persistable) requests fail in flight, the solution is to handle that gracefully, not to retry it without a basis or understanding for why it failed.

marcaaron · 2022-05-26T01:47:11Z

What @roryabraham said + also want to quickly document that a consequence of this change is that some quasi-optimistic writes that kind of work offline will be broken by this change in a very minor way and only in the situation where we suddenly go offline or the site is down.

Offline features for these requests will still mostly work while you are offline. We just will stop handling that edge case for all commands (except Report_AddComment since it is in the SequentialQueue). Ultimately, we are going to rip this code out anyway and will be more explicit in the future about which things will be retried and which will not.

This will also free up @madmax330 to focus on the retry changes for the SequentialQueue without having to consider a system where both reads and writes could be retried on failure.

OSBotify · 2022-05-26T01:53:56Z

✋ This PR was not deployed to staging yet because QA is ongoing. It will be automatically deployed to staging after the next production release.

OSBotify · 2022-05-26T19:12:54Z

🚀 Deployed to staging by @roryabraham in version: 1.1.68-0 🚀

platform	result
🤖 android 🤖	success ✅
🖥 desktop 🖥	failure ❌
🍎 iOS 🍎	success ✅
🕸 web 🕸	success ✅

OSBotify · 2022-05-30T09:28:24Z