SWISH Notebook Pengine Thread Dies: To Scroll or not to scroll?

SWI-Prolog web site and services
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SWISH Users!

There’s a choice to be made regarding the behavior of Notebooks.

Scenario 1:
You’re working away on SWISH and set a long running query going. Not wishing to wait around for it you scroll down the page. Unfortunately your Pengine thread dies, but SWISH is kind enough to scroll you back to the query to alert you of this.

Scenario 2:
You’re studying some topic in SWISH, you run a nondet query and get an answer. But, perhaps because you’re new to SWISH or through carelessness, you haven’t hit “Stop” on the query so your Pengine thread is still alive. You’re carrying on your studies when the Pengine thread timeouts and dies. SWISH scrolls you back to the query to alert you to this, which is an annoying interruption to your studies.

So the question is, what do we do when the Pengine thread dies?

  • Scroll
  • Don’t Scroll

0 voters

1 Like
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The best way, imho, is to bubble up a little notification saying “Your query is done, click here to go back to it”; the bubble will have an ‘X’ on the top right corner to close it if I just want to continue reading.

2 Likes
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From an UX point of view, if the user had one solution already and scrolls away I wouldn’t take him/her back.

I agree that if the pengine died because of a timeout without any solution provided, it is ok to draw users attention auto scrolling.