Thunderbird:Activity Manager

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Activity Manager

There are 2 major pieces to the Activity Manager.

• Thunderbird:Activity Manager/Service — collects errors and events from the components inside Thunderbird and translates information for display in the Activity Manager Window
• Thunderbird:Activity Manager/Window — displays information about and gives actions related to the system and user actions performed according to the Activity Manager Service

The Activity Manager Service is recording actions performed by the user and some actions taken by Thunderbird. While the Activity Manager Window is providing an interaction point for the user see what actions were performed in the past as well as what actions are currently being processed by Thunderbird.

Development for the Activity Manager can be tracked in bug 257942

While the Activity Manager can show more detailed information about any specific item, the Thunderbird:Interactive Status Bar only shows some of the high level events.

Activity Items

There are 2 different classifications of activity items which can be displayed in the Activity Manager Window.

Processes

Processes are vague notions of activity and provided for the users benefit. They do not directly translate into an operating system process or Thunderbird thread and therefore can be comprised of many different parts of which are actually separate processes internally.

Processes are transient in the display. They are not written to disk as they are always acting on some data that already exists locally or remotely. If a process has finished and needs to keep some state for the user (like last sync time) it can convert itself into an event.

Processes can be in one of these states

• Active
  • When a process is running (like sending mail)
• Try Again
  • When a process failed to run and is waiting on a certain timeout before trying again
  • Users can interrupt this state by telling the process to run now or cancel
• Waiting for Input
  • A process can only continue if the user gives additional input (like a password)
    • Additional input is not acknowledgement of a problem
• Finished
  • When a process is done and has converted itself into an event
  • Not all processes need to convert to events (such as sending mail)

Singular and likely active items means a process keeps a transient status. The display of a process can be transient or remain indefinitely in the activity manager journal; however there is only one. Processes can create events or errors for the Activity Manager but processes themselves are not events or errors.

Active Processes are always sorted at the top of the Activity Manager Window while they are active. Once a process is finished it converts to an event and is sorted like an event.

Here are 2 examples of processes:

Account Activity

A Process connected to the mail account which creates multiple events for different activities. This is the parent process essentially responsible for the connections between thunderbird and a mail server. As it synchronizes mail or performs user initiated actions it can create events or errors in the Activity Manager.

Possible Events Created:

• Moved - Folder / Message / Conversation
• Copied - Folder / Message / Conversation
• Deleted - Folder / Message / Conversation

Possible Errors Created

• Server Password Error
• Server Connection Error

Sending Mail

A parent process which represents the connection to an SMTP server. The display of this process is transient and so only appears when needed. Once the connection to the server is made this process can display progress as it creates Sent Message events for each message sent.

Errors

Errors are items attached to a process. The indicate a problem that can't be reconciled by Thunderbird.

Errors may be shown to the user and therefore should only be used sparingly.

By default anytime an error occurs that Thunderbird may be able to recover from by trying again we do not use an error. Instead the process displays it's status as trying again after a certain timeout with an option to try now for the user skip the timeout period.

Events

Historical actions performed by the user and created by a process for the Activity Manager Window. Events can show up in the Thunderbird:Interactive Status Bar and be displayed to users as they are created. However often the process is being actively displayed.

The goal of an event is to provide a historical context to the user about actions they performed, such as sending mail or deleting contacts. In future versions events could have an and undo context to all people to recover from operations they didn't intend.

Old Designs

These designs need to be cleaned up and associated with examples above.

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Synchronize _GMail_ messages                          10:30am |
| [=================================================    ]   (x) |
| 1 minute remaining -- 146 of 148 _new messages_               |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Synchronize _GMail_ messages                        yesterday |
| Canceled                                                  (&) |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Sent message _Road Trip Plans_                        10:30am |
| to:joe@example.com, 1 attachment                              |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Moving _Road Trip Plans_ to _Archives_                10:32am |
| to:joe@example.com, 1 attachment                              |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

Much of this taken from the blog post Activity is the new Download

Relevant Bugs

• bug 123440 — Stop that annoying modal dialog when mail can't connect to the mail server from connection time out error
• bug 253426 — display activity in status bar
• bug 131965 — Actions of message filters should be displayed in the status bar
• bug 194949 — better status / progress UI feedback with junk mail
• bug 238972 — should have extensive/detailed download status window
• bug 227551 — No error message when connection to POP3 server lost