Contributors list stalling due to rate limiting (need helpful error message)

[jywarren]

Hi, I'm not sure if this is related to #112 but probably not -- I noticed that after seeing it work for a while, i seem to be in a stuck state where the contributors list is not loading:

Is it possible I'm getting rate limited or something? And if so, should I be getting a specific error saying so? @Rishabh570 i know you're a bit busy right now but wondering if you could ID the failure point so we can work on this a bit. Thanks!

[jywarren]

Here's one error at least I'm seeing:

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 403 (Forbidden)

[jywarren]

So, just noting that if we do hit rate limits, maybe we could catch and handle that error and display a message saying like API rate limit encountered, please wait ____ minutes to refresh #53

[jywarren]

Aha, i see @Rishabh570 found the error returned, it's a 403 so we have to recognize it:

Yep, we have to put catch blocks in places where network calls happening...but I observed that the error object doesn't contain API limit exceeded for ..., it only has a status of 403, so we can put a simple statement checking if the error.status == 403 and if its true, we can call some function from ui.js to show the appropriate message to the user...

For now at least it's probably enough to just detect the error code being 403. I updated the title accordingly!

[jywarren]

I believe the request is generated here!

community-toolbox/src/utils/getRepoContributors.js

Lines 32 to 44 in 0368736

	function getCommitsInRange(username, repo, options){
	url = "https://api.github.com/repos/"+username+"/"+repo+"/commits?since=" + options["since"]["date"]+ "T" + options["since"]["time"] + "Z"+"&until="+options["until"]["date"]+"T"+ options["until"]["time"] + "Z";
	result = httpGet(url);
	return JSON.parse(result);
	}
	// send GET request
	function httpGet(url){
	var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
	xmlHttp.open( "GET", url, false ); // false for synchronous request
	xmlHttp.send( null );
	return xmlHttp.responseText;
	}

[somenath1435]

@jywarren @Rishabh570 can I work on this issue??

[Rishabh570]

@somenath1435 Yeah, sure. You can work on it if you'd like to contribute.

So, this file fetches contributors of a particular repository, the catch block throws the error which goes to fetchRepoContribsUtil.js (this might be the cause, I reckon it is not propagating the error further in the pipeline which is resulting in notification not being shown). This fetchRepoContribsUtil.js ideally should be throwing error to contribsUtil/main and which should eventually throw the error to community-toolbox.js which finally shows the error.

Feel free to ask if you need any help 👍

[somenath1435]

@Rishabh570 How can I communicate with you? I can't find you in gitter

[jywarren]

Another short term fix could be to add a message like

Fetching from GitHub API. This may stall if rate limit is exceeded; if so, try refreshing in X minutes.