How to display errors

We can display errors by altering this:

$response = $this->httpRequestFactory->get($this->apiUrl.'?usertext='.$editor,[
	'username' => $this->apiUser,
	'password' => $this->apiPassword
], __METHOD__ );
if ( $response ) {
	$json = json_decode( $response, true );
	if ( $json ) {
		// Return array of Neighbors

To something like this:

$request = $this->httpRequestFactory->create($this->apiUrl.'?usertext='.$editor,[
	'username' => $this->apiUser,
	'password' => $this->apiPassword
], __METHOD__ );
$status = $request->execute();

Which allows us to check $status->isOK(). Most of the error messages below are accessible via $request->getContent(), if we decide to display them.

What errors can occur

@Prtksxna Would it be possible to make mockups for an error state? The errors we can get back from the Similarusers get_similar_users endpoint are summarised below. What should we communicate to the user in each case? I'm imagining that the user might want to see details about the errors that can occur on successful form submission, as well as timeout errors and the database refresh error. But probably not errors caused by software bugs (these are logged, so we can look them up).

Footnotes

[1] These error messages are returned by Flask's abort method and aren't easily accessible. They are embedded within HTML snippets that need to be parsed. (As an improvement, we could update Similarusers to return a Flask Response object instead.)
[2] We receive these error messages in full
[3] We may have to do some work to determine when there was a timeout and displaying something helpful

@Tchanders and I discussed that we need to categorize the error states a bit more:

• How likely is the user to see this error?
• Can they recover from the error? How?
• Is there information that they'd need to share with us for debugging purposes?

We also talked about the display of error messages:

• Form validation errors will stay where they are
• Other errors will show up above the form box
  • We'll continue to show the form below the error and not have a separate page just to show errors

How likely is the user to see this error?

It's hard to say anything other than the obvious - I don't particularly expect lots of software bugs, but there may well be users out there with too few or too many edits

Can they recover from the error? How?

I've added another column for this - basically no, except for the database refresh error

Is there information that they'd need to share with us for debugging purposes?

I don't think it's necessary - we should have enough info in the error logs.

Thanks for the mockup. If you could provide some copy for the messages then I'll file a follow-up task.

Thanks @Tchanders. Wanted to confirm that the time out error (last one in the table) isn't recoverable and trying again later won't help.

Working on the messages now and will share them soon.

In T308649#8008031, @Prtksxna wrote:

Thanks @Tchanders. Wanted to confirm that the time out error (last one in the table) isn't recoverable and trying again later won't help.

Working on the messages now and will share them soon.

Yes, it's not recoverable and is related to the users being searched and how active they are, so trying again soon after won't help.

In T308649#7998500, @Tchanders wrote:

Thanks for the mockup. If you could provide some copy for the messages then I'll file a follow-up task.

Thanks @Prtksxna - filed as:

• T311724: Display generic error message on Special:SimilarEditors
• T311536: Display some errors returned from Similarusers on Special:SimilarEditors
• T311535: Display error on Special:SimilarEditors when the database is being refreshed