Asynchronous nature of the Nuxeo UI creates numerous ways for failures

The Nuxeo UI appears to have an asynchronous interface such that a user can start (intentionally or accidentally) more than one operation at a time. Or put another way, it doesn't lock the UI while an operation is underway (e.g. as my bank UI does). However, there appears to be no protection against operations which conflict with one another and cause the UI to throw exceptions. We don't understand why the UI was designed this way which basically allows a user to shoot themselves in the foot.

We see these problems in our testing and our users have seen these problems as well.It's particularly problematic when you are performing operations that take a long time. It's not always clear when an operation is in progress (e.g. there's no hourglass) and a user may even forget or get distracted and start another operation while a previous one is still going. Long running operations create large windows of opportunity for these types of failures to occur.

These errors are very easy to reproduce and seem to happen in all sorts of conditions. A log is enclosed with 3 separate failures. The first came from dealing with a large folder (~330MB) in the worklist and in another folder. While the folder was being deleted, I happened to click on the "x" to delete it from the worklist as well. That produced an exception. In the second case, I was pasting this large folder and got mixed up about which monitor my mouse was in and type a vi command which caused an exception. In the third case, I was deleting the folder and while that was in progress, I clicked on the "paste in current folder" link.I think there are many ways to reproduce problems which stem from this problem of allowing operations to interfere with each other.

What we would like to see is a Nuxeo UI that doesn't allow users to do things which make their UI's "blow-up" (or worse). I sure wouldn't stay at a bank whose UI did that or allowed me to do harmful operations. And we want our users to have faith in the integrity of the CMS that they're using. Thus, we would like Nuxeo to address this seemingly inherent problem that occurs as a result of allowing async. operations.