Improve user experience when the backend is down

[kazlauskis]

It was an idea from Steph to help users inform of maintenance downtime.

We should develop a mechanism for the app to check if the Drupal website and the Indicia warehouse are down. Ideally, there should be some https://website/health endpoint that allows the app to read a downtime message in case it can’t communicate to any of the servers. An admin would write a status message, which would then be fetched by the app and displayed to the user as a popup or a banner, similar to how websites do it. This endpoint could serve all the BRC apps linked to the same infrastructure.

A simple static JSON file hosted on some website might do the trick. It should be independent of the current infrastructure.

One way to implement this would be to pick a more reliable Drupal website like the brc.ac.uk hosted on Pantheon and create a content type called AppMessage with the following fields: Title, Message. BRC website admin could then create AppMessage content entries (nodes), which would then be exposed to brc.ac.uk/app-messages endpoint as JSON and read by any BRC apps. This setup wouldn't need to be limited to downtime messages and could be used to message app users for other things, too.

[kazlauskis]

@DavidRoy @johnvanbreda app users are contacting me asking why apps are timing out when communicating with the website or the warehouse. Sometimes, it is planned maintenance, but occasionally, the backend is down, so it would be better to show a more informative message to the user.