The subsystems are separate tables, so each sized its own columns from
its own content and no two lined up. Reading down the page meant reading
down six different layouts, which is what made it look busy. They now
share one colgroup and a fixed table layout: Kind, Status, Last result
and the Start button are the same width in every group, and the Test
column takes the remainder.
Two things had to come out of the columns first, because both are long
enough to stretch a cell and drag one group's grid out of step with the
rest. The details block moves to a full-width row of its own, where the
prose and the operator steps have room and opening one no longer widens
the Test column. The requires note moves from under the Start button to
under Status, which is sized for it: the catalog's longest names three
prerequisites in 73 characters, and beneath a button it wrapped into a
ragged stack. It reads better there anyway, next to the reason the test
is required rather than beneath the control it disables.
Also gives a test's description its own block in the details. Without
operator steps to separate them it ran straight into the Requires line.
A campaign is mostly waiting for the next Start. The page now offers two
queues, and each takes every test of its kinds the campaign does not
already count as satisfied: Unattended for the auto tests, which need
nobody in the room, and Operator and live for the ones that need somebody
at the machine, since they prompt and they fire the laser. The buttons
say how many they would run and ask before starting; the live queue names
the tests that fire and takes the acknowledgment once, for all of them.
A queue runs one test at a time through the runner's single slot, in
prerequisite order. Registration order otherwise, so a run reads down the
page, but a prerequisite inside the queue always goes first. It stops on
the first result that is not a PASS: a FAIL closes the campaign, and
carrying on would only open a second one behind the operator's back. A
test the runner refuses to start is skipped with the reason on the page
and the rest carry on, which is what happens to an auto test waiting on an
operator one: run the attended queue, then the unattended one again.
The queue lives in the runner, not in the tab, so reloading the page or
closing it leaves the run alone. While one is up it holds the machine
between its tests as well as during them, so a single Start and the bench
tools are refused rather than cutting in. Stop the queue cancels what is
still waiting and lets the run in progress finish; Abort ends that one
too, and lands as the non-PASS that stops the queue. Every run a queue
starts records which one put it there.
Also moves the /state ETag test to the end of its class. It invalidates,
timestamps are whole seconds, and a PASS stamped in the same second as an
invalidate is deliberately not inheritable, so on a fast run it decided
the inheritance an earlier test was checking.
forgetest is a dev-only component and can never appear in a coverage map,
so this has no acceptance catalog consequence.
Presses on Start and Continue were being swallowed. Every poll rebuilt
the whole test table and the prompt buttons with innerHTML, and a button
destroyed between mousedown and mouseup raises no click event at all:
the press simply vanished. Measured on the page as it stood, a Start
button node was replaced 13 times in 40 seconds, and with a poll landing
mid-press 8 presses out of 8 were lost. Rows, prompt buttons and tool
entries are now built once and afterwards only updated in place through
setters that skip the write when the value has not changed; under the
same test 8 presses out of 8 land.
The page also felt slow because each poll re-read and re-parsed the whole
result log and recomputed all 42 domain fingerprints. A result record
carries its run log, so the file reaches megabytes over a campaign and
the poll cost grew with it. The log now parses each line once and reads
only the bytes appended since, and a fingerprint is memoized against the
manifest's content hash. On the same manifest, catalog and log, one
/state goes from 8.89 ms to 0.10 ms at 0.89 MB and from 41.79 ms to
0.23 ms at 10.62 MB, and no longer grows with the log.
Actions now report on the press instead of on the next poll: Start greys
every Start and marks the row, Continue and Abort grey themselves, and
each pulls the next poll forward. /state carries an ETag so an idle page
polls for a 304, the poll ticks faster during a run, and the connection
is kept alive rather than handshaking per request.
Keeping the connection alive exposed a hazard worth naming: a POST
refused before its body was read left that body in the socket, where the
next read took it for a request line. A refusal now ends the connection.
forgetest is a dev-only component and can never appear in a coverage map,
so this has no acceptance catalog consequence; the host tests carry the
proof, including one that fails if a per-poll innerHTML rebuild ever
comes back.
ScottW514