Adding an attachment via the "attachments" panel on the right loses unsaved comment

[zsquareplusc]

I was typing in a comment to a bug when i realized that i want to attach a logfile. So i clicked on "Add" in the sidebar. This opened a new page with an empty comment field and the opportunity to attach a file. Clicking the back button brought me back to the previous page but the text in the comment box was gone.

It would be nice if it would at least warn the user when there is an unsaved comment.

With all the nice AJAX features added recently i actually expected that some field pops up where i can add my file. Instead it loaded a new page. Well whatever, i just don't like to type things twice :/

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

On Mon, Nov 02, 2009 at 02:06:46AM -0000, zsquareplusc wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> I was typing in a comment to a bug when i realized that i want to attach
> a logfile. So i clicked on "Add" in the sidebar. This opened a new page
> with an empty comment field

Which browser are you using? The comment field on the new page should
have the comment you had typed in on the bug page.

    status incomplete

> It would be nice if it would at least warn the user when there is an
> unsaved comment.

We don't warn, since it's designed so that you won't loose the comment.
Not sure why that didn't work for you.

> With all the nice AJAX features added recently i actually expected that
> some field pops up where i can add my file. Instead it loaded a new
> page. Well whatever, i just don't like to type things twice :/

Feel like contributing a patch? :) Launchpad is open source, you know!
The reason it's not AJAX, is that it was simply too much work to do it,
we didn't have enough time. Javascript can't (for good reasons) read
files from the local disk, thus uploading files via Javascript is far
from trivial. That's why we made the decision to keep it as a separate
form, but still retain the comment you typed, in case someone wanted to
attach a file in the middle. I don't know why that didn't work for you.

[zsquareplusc (zsquareplusc)]

ahh i see where the difference is.

- the "Add an attachment" link below the comment field works as you describe.
- the "Add" link in the box "Bug attachments" on the right side does not. It looses the comment.

The "Bug attachments" box is only visible if there are already attachments. You could argue that its in a separate box so it is OK when it works differently. But i'd object because the links look similar, so a user can not know when the click is harmful (loosing text) or not.

I'm using FF3.5 (Karmic)

[jhfhlkjlj (fdsuufijjejejejej-deactivatedaccount)]

zsquareplusc is right. If you use the "add" button on the right hand side, it does lose your unsaved text.

[jhfhlkjlj (fdsuufijjejejejej-deactivatedaccount)]

Hi, there.

Might I inquire as to why this was set back to new?

[Graham Binns (gmb)]

@chauncellor

Curtis set this back to New because he changed that target from the "Launchpad itself" project (which is a general project) to "Launchpad Bugs" (which is the specific project for the bug tracker portion of Launchpad.

I've marked this as triaged accordingly.

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

Importance low? WTF? That's insulting to people who waste their time typing things twice while trying to help make Ubuntu better.

This is DATA LOSS, it can't be any less than High.