User receives unwanted notifications for application chat about karrot-frontend

[tiltec]

But in any case, the backend fix could come first. And then we'll see the failures pop up in frontend sentry.

[tiltec]

I ran a quick test in the backend. When frontend sends seen_up_to, the backend seems to create a participant and save it, even when there was no participant before. I guess this shouldn't happen and we can prevent it in backend. Maybe by returning an error. Then we go to frontend and make sure that it doesn't trigger the error...

So in that sense, backend is allowed to create a participant when the notifications field is set properly, but otherwise not.

    def test_mark_seen_up_to_when_not_in_conversation(self):
        user = UserFactory()
        group = GroupFactory(members=[self.user2, user])
        conversation = ConversationFactory(group=group, participants=[self.user2])
        message = conversation.messages.create(author=self.user2, content='yay')
        self.client.force_login(user=user)

        response = self.client.get('/api/conversations/{}/'.format(conversation.id), format='json')
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, status.HTTP_200_OK)
        self.assertEqual(response.data['seen_up_to'], None)
        self.assertFalse(ConversationParticipant.objects.filter(conversation=conversation.id, user=user.id).exists())

        data = {'seen_up_to': message.id}
        response = self.client.patch('/api/conversations/{}/'.format(conversation.id), data, format='json')
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, status.HTTP_200_OK)
        self.assertEqual(response.data['seen_up_to'], message.id)

        participant = ConversationParticipant.objects.get(conversation=conversation.id, user=user.id)
        self.assertFalse(ConversationParticipant.objects.filter(conversation=conversation.id, user=user.id).exists())
        print(participant)
        self.assertEqual(participant.seen_up_to, message)

[nicksellen]

Great, sounds promising.... I wonder if it's possible to recreate the frontend sending spurious seen_up_to API requests? That would make it feel quite likely to be the cause. I couldn't find an obvious way from a glance...

We do check whether the user is a participant here before marking as read:

karrot-frontend/src/messages/components/ChatConversation.vue

Lines 298 to 315 in 479dbbf

	markRead (messageId) {
	if (!this.isParticipant) return // no marking as read if not part of it ...
	const isThreadReply = this.conversation.thread && this.messageId !== this.conversation.thread
	// TODO: check conversation.unreadMessageCount is available
	if (!isThreadReply && this.conversation.unreadMessageCount > 0) {
	this.markSeenUpTo({
	conversationId: this.conversation.id,
	messageId,
	})
	}
	// TODO: check threadMeta.unreadReplyCount available?
	if (isThreadReply && this.conversation.threadMeta && this.conversation.threadMeta.unreadReplyCount > 0) {
	this.markThreadSeenUpTo({
	threadId: this.conversation.thread,
	messageId,
	})
	}
	},