Prevent retries for genuinely failed uploads

[RitikaPahwa4444]

What is the user problem or growth opportunity you want to see solved?

No response

How do you know that this problem exists today? Why is this important?

The app retries all failed uploads, even if they fail for a genuine reason like invalid filename. This impacts the UX badly [details].

Who will benefit from it?

No response

Anything else you would like to add?

No response

[Glassar]

Hi, me and my group are taking a crack at this as part of a uni course for the next week. Could we get assigned this?

[nicolas-raoul]

@Glassar It is yours! :-) If too hard, easier issues like #5565 or #4895 are available.

(note for GSoC: If this bug gets solved, we will replace the GSoC's tasks with another of similar size)

[Glassar]

Thank you, and great to have those suggestions. We have done a first code inspection and think this should be doable though so we'll start here

[Glassar]

We have done quite a bit of digging and found where an upload attempt fails (in uploadWorker, or this is at least where the failure is determined).

So our plan right now is to add code to the "failure" points in UploadWorker.uploadContribution which passes the failure reason onwards. This can then be used in ContributionsFragment.retryUpload to determine if this is a genuine failure and the attempt abandoned, or if it should try again. Finally this failure reason could also be used give the user better information about why their upload has failed repeatedly link.

But to determine what is a genuine failure, we need to know/decide what is a genuine failure which can the be used as a whitelist to stop retrying (one obvious example which won't change is if we get a FileNotFoundException). And this might be identified through for example exception messages, but we are having some trouble with determining what those exact conditions might be. Any ideas of the kind of errors might belong here, or where we should look?

Another thing we are wondering about is passing the information. The easiest and most intuitive way would be to add another field to the Contribution class for an error message as this how if it failed is already passed around. But the contributions are stored on the DB and as such we are not sure it storing the failure information there is optimal, any tips here?

Finally it seems reasonable to notify the user about what is going wrong with their upload, both when it fails to many retries and when we determine that it is a genuine failure. In what way should these notifications be sent (as far as I can see there is already sent something to the user in UploadWorker when it fails)?

[nicolas-raoul]

One case I sometimes see is when the picture has been uploaded already, but the app somehow believes it failed, and retry.

[RitikaPahwa4444]

I shared one reason for the case Nicolas mentioned above in this issue: #5280, might help.

[RitikaPahwa4444]

Any ideas of the kind of errors might belong here, or where we should look?

Invalid filenames also cause this issue. I tried adding a § sign in the caption, it keeps failing.