A view whose data feed fails is given a new one, not the broken one back

Every live view in the portal reads its data through a feed that keeps it in step with whoever owns that data. A feed can give up — the owner moved, a snapshot never arrived, a node was removed while someone was looking at it. Giving up is deliberate and it is the useful outcome: the view is told, and being told is what lets it ask for a fresh feed and carry on. Silence is the failure mode that costs an afternoon; an error is the one you can recover from.

The recovery had a gap. A view that reacted to the failure the instant it was told — which is the only moment it can react — asked for a replacement feed and was handed the one that had just failed. The replacement was dead on arrival, so the view stayed empty, and asking again changed nothing: a momentary failure had become a permanent one for that page, for as long as the portal was running.

What changes

A feed that fails is out of service from the instant anyone can see it has failed. Asking for it again now produces a new feed that reconnects from scratch — which is what "the view is told so it can recover" was always supposed to mean.

And whatever declines to serve the broken feed can still say what went wrong. The two used to be separate facts published a moment apart, and whichever order they were published in, something read them while they disagreed: either a view was handed a feed that was already dead, or it was told the data had simply ended when in fact it had failed — and a view that thinks the data ended has no error to show, so it renders nothing at all. They are now one fact, so neither reading is possible.

What you will notice

Mostly nothing, which is the point — this is the behaviour that was intended. Where it shows:

• A page whose data feed dropped recovers by itself rather than staying blank until you reload.
• A view whose underlying item is gone shows its "this is gone" card instead of an empty space.

For the record

This also removes an intermittent test failure that had been reading as flakiness. It was not flakiness: the same defect, reached by a consumer that had to win a race of a few microseconds to land in the window, which it did about once in fifty runs.