Auto refresh the issue board and make it reflect real time

Problem

The issue board already feels like a UI piece that reflects real time.. except its not.

Also, the issueboard has 2 usecases where real time ness is important:

1. when doing a remote meeting and I change the label on a certain issue.. the one screencasting their screen with the issue board should not have to refresh their tab in order to see those changes.. as to avoid wasting time on an issue not relevant.

Original content issue: This is a problem for us at the moment as we have up 10 members of the team using the board. It has been annoying to keep track of the board as there is the constant need to manually refresh it to see any updates.

1. for a non remote office. the issue board could be alway on screen on some monitor.. as to let everybody be aware of how issues are moving through their pipeline for example... or what still needs work etc.

Proposal

Make issue boards real time.. its already built in vue and is one of our prime UI views.

Links / references

Added feature proposal in GitLab FOSS ~579196 labels

@kishsingh Thank you for your feedback.

@iamphill Do you know if this feature proposal has been raised already?

@markglenfletcher First time seen this. However it is something me & @jschatz1 have spoken about, so soon hopefully!

Added ~874211 label

mentioned in issue gitlab-foss#24058 (closed)

mentioned in issue gitlab-foss#26221 (closed)

I'd like to extend the proposal, so auto refresh not only happens when moving issues between lists on the board, but also when new issues have been created, issues have been updated (think of label changes, i. e. "implicit" list moves), or been deleted by other users (or by the same user by a different browser session or API session).

Please have in mind that auto refreshing whole page will not be a good idea for a board member whos editing an issue on that moment - they will loose changes.

The best will be to use web sockets and refresh just the part changed right before.

Any update about this feature?

+1 Would be great!

• Auto refresh boards and their issues on search (ajax)
• No need to press ENTER to update the boards when searching
• Auto refresh (ajax) issues shown inside boards when they're updated by other team members or on another tab of the same browser

according to @iamphill: the amount of requests. if there are 10 lists, thats 10 requests

want to quote @smcgivern here from https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/C1RNTKQ6N/p1498667365539149:

we're not going to poll once per list, so we need to cache and cache invalidation is one of the two hard problems

So how do we progress this issue?

cc: @victorwu (as you were part of the discussion in slack)

There's many parts to be real-time-ed. For me, the most useful would be an issue appearing/disappearing in real-time per the milestone. For example, I am looking at a board with a saved/associated milestone. I'm managing issues and talking to people about scheduling. I click on an issue in the board and update the milestone from the sidebar. I expect the issue to disappear from the board right away. And then I switch to another open tab in my browser with a board with that target milestone. I expect the issue to now appear in that board without needing refresh.

@dimitrieh : Can you talk about which use cases would be useful and we can start considering those first.

@victorwu your usecase would make use of the same real-time-ed functionality not?

My examples are the following:

• Adjusting labels on the fly, see them being updated in real life (on a board visible to everyone.. for example while screencasting or having a monitor in an office displaying the issueboard 24-7)
• I want to see issues progress through label stages, as a spectator, while someone else is doing the I2P demo.. from todo>doing>done lists

We're attempting to use our Board for sprint planning and having auto refresh would be extremely helpful.

changed milestone to %Next 3-6 months in gitlab-foss

mentioned in issue gitlab-foss#36002 (closed)

copy over the Description content from gitlab-foss#36002 (closed) (adjusted this issue's description accordingly)

Problem

The issue board already feels like a UI piece that reflects real time.. except its not.

Also, the issueboard has 2 usecases where real time ness is important:

1. when doing a remote meeting and I change the label on a certain issue.. the one screencasting their screen with the issue board should not have to refresh their tab in order to see those changes.. as to avoid wasting time on an issue not relevant.
2. for a non remote office. the issue board could be alway on screen on some monitor.. as to let everybody be aware of how issues are moving through their pipeline for example... or what still needs work etc.

Proposal

Make issue boards real time.. its already built in vue and is one of our prime UI views.

@smcgivern @iamphill can we discuss any problems that getting this will encounter? perhaps this can be a quick win!!!

changed title from Auto refresh the board to Auto refresh the issue board and make it reflect real time

changed the description

added frontend in GitLab FOSS label

removed frontend in GitLab FOSS label

@dimitrieh it depends what you mean by 'quick' It's not just like we sprinkle 'real-time' on a feature to make it so; in fact, we have to deal with one of the two hard problems: cache invalidation.

It sounds like the cache would be invalidated any time an issue on the board changes title, label, or assignee; and also any time an issue was implicitly added to or removed from the board (through a state change). For something like this project, for instance, the cache for a board with no filters would be invalidated constantly, making it basically useless as a cache.

This is already in %Next 3-6 months in gitlab-foss so I guess we're going to try to tackle it soon anyway?

mentioned in issue gitlab-foss#34388 (moved)

moved from gitlab-foss#22675 (moved)