Viewing project metadata tab makes expensive PUT request

[hannes-ucsc]

Simply clicking on the metadata tab of the details page for any project causes a manifest generation to be kicked off.

CleanShot.2025-05-27.at.10.19.20-converted.2.mp4

Manifest generations are expensive and should not be started without the user's explicit directive. That's why the request uses the PUT method, as opposed to GET. As can be seen in the screen recording, there is a long-ish pause while the browser waits for Azul to finish the generation. It is likely that the user navigates away from the page before the generation completes, in which case the generation was started in vein, and even if it finishes before the user navigates away, it is not clear the user even intended to download the manifest.

Once the generation finishes, the only thing that changes in the UI is that the manifest file name is displayed. However, the file name is predictable, so there is no point in kicking off an expensive manifest generation, just to render a file name.

[dsotirho-ucsc]

Assignee to coordinate with CC.

[frano-m]

Hi @hannes-ucsc thanks so much for this - how do we predict the file name?

[hannes-ucsc]

It's the project short name (hits[*].projects[0].projectShortname) plus the current date and time.

[NoopDog]

This call as cached correct? So the date and time only work for the first call? We see dates and times not matching any current time zone.

I suppose we can just drop date and the time from the initial file name display.

[NoopDog]

Hi @hannes-ucsc can you clarify what you mean by expensive to help us assign a priority to this ticket? Thx !

[dsotirho-ucsc]

@hannes-ucsc: "A manifest generation is kicked-off after every release of Azul or any changes to the index, the first time a user clicks on the Metadata tab of the Details page. The first user to click a large project such as Tabula Muris would have to wait several minutes before the file name is displayed. I can't quantify a price tag, but the above behavior should make it obvious that this is undesirable and should be fixed as soon as possible. Thanks."

[NoopDog]

Ok thx, thanks. This is in progress now.

[NoopDog]

The use cases here are download and copy to the clipboard. We would also like the "Request File Manifest" and "Request Metadata" to behave the same. So to address this, we will.

1. Hide the "Download" and "Copy to Clipboard" buttons initially, as it's an expensive call to get the download links.
2. When the user selects the download link, we will request the download link and then use that to show the "Download" and "Copy to Clipboard" links.
3. In the case that the XLSX metadata file does not exist, we will instead show the "No metadata file for this project" message. (This exists for all Lattice ingested projects.)