Better UI for long-running authority merges

[Jane Sandberg]

Authority merges can be very slow (see related bug 1193490)

After a user clicks on the "Merge Records" button in the new angular Manage Authorities screen, there is no indication that Evergreen is working on the request. For quick merges, that's not a problem! But when a merge takes more than a few seconds, the user may be left wondering if Evergreen is doing anything, they forgot to press the button, etc.

Also, when an authority merge does time out, there is no indication in the screen for the user. All I get is a console message:

open-ils.cat.authority.records.merge failed! stat=500 msg= *** Call to [open-ils.cat.authority.records.merge] failed for session [REDACTED], thread trace [0]:
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /usr/local/share/perl/5.28.1/OpenILS/Application/Cat.pm line 1031.

It would be better to let the user know that their merge failed.

[Mary C. Wilson (mcwilson6)]

Confirmed that this is going on in version 3.7.2 when I tried to merge 2 authority records. One has 478 bibs attached and the other has 42 bibs. After clicking on "Merge Records" the menu just sat there forever with no indication of progress, time out, or failure.

[Yamil (ysuarez)]

For additional context, I suspect that this timeout issue is related to this older bug I reported...

Authority merge time out when too many [linked] records
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1193490

[Andrea Neiman (aneiman)]

The bug that Yamil links in comment #2 is resolved by the Queued Ingest work, bug 1979071 - would be interesting to see if Queued Ingest helps here as well.