Details
-
Bug
-
Status: Closed
-
Minor
-
Resolution: Won't Fix
-
9.2.0
-
None
-
None
Description
In our test suite we see some intermittent failures related to AbstractAjaxTimerBehavior. At a few places in our application, we use a background poller at a 1 sec interval that checks for an out-of-band submission of the form data. So the user either has to fill the form via the web interface or via some other route. Either route can complete the form, but as soon as one of the two is triggered, the other must stop. The race condition lies in the AbstractAjaxTimerBehavior triggering while the user has already submitted the form manually.
The naive implementation would stop AbstractAjaxTimerBehavior via Wicket.Timer.clear('timer0') in the Ajax response of the form submit. However, this results in a very large gap between the moment of submission and the actual moment the timer is stopped. To fix this, we've added the following code to the AjaxSubmitLink:
@Override public void renderHead(IHeaderResponse response) { super.renderHead(response); response.render(OnDomReadyHeaderItem.forScript( "Wicket.Event.add('" + getMarkupId() + "', 'click', " + "function() {Wicket.Timer.clear('" + getTimerId() + "');})")); }
This puts the call to Wicket.Timer.clear before the actual Ajax submit and should therefore prevent the timer from triggering after the Ajax submit is done. However, in very rare occurrences we still see the timer triggering. When it happens, the timer is always directly after the Ajax submit (often within 10ms). This makes us believe the current implementation has a race condition in the following way:
- The user clicks the Ajax submit link
- The execution of the event handlers is started in the browser
- At this moment the setTimeout triggers, but it is suspended because JS is single threaded and the browser is already execution JS in response to UI interaction
- The first event handler now clears the timer
- The second event handler performs the Ajax call
- Now the JS executor is freed and the timer function is executed
Although I'm not entirely at home in the execution model of JS in a browser, this is the only explanation I could come up with. There is no way to reproduce it, other than run a complex test suite 1000ths of times. My proposed fix is to replace the timeout function in wicket-ajax-jquery.js in Wicket.Timer.set with this:
Wicket.TimerHandles[timerId] = setTimeout(function() { if (timerId in Wicket.TimerHandles) { Wicket.Timer.clear(timerId); f(); } }, delay);
This should prevent the function f() to be executed after the timer has been cleared (Wicket.Timer.clear deletes the timerId from Wicket.TimerHandles.