Bug Report: Infinite Loading When Clicking Notification for Deleted Bill

Zisha

Description

Clicking a notification that links to a deleted Bill (e.g., “Bill #1729 – Items Received”) results in an infinite loading spinner. The page never resolves and no message explains that the Bill no longer exists.

Steps to Recreate

1. Create a Bill (e.g., via receiving against a PO) so a notification is generated (e.g., “Bill #____ – Items Received”).
2. Delete the Bill.
3. From Notifications, click the Bill notification.
4. Observe the page behavior.

Expected Result

• The application should gracefully handle missing/removed Bills by:
  • Displaying a clear message such as “This Bill is unavailable. It may have been deleted, moved, or you don’t have permission to view it.”, and/or
  • Redirecting to a safe fallback (e.g., Bills list) with a banner explaining what happened.

Actual Result

• The route loads an endless spinner/gear and never completes.
• No user-facing explanation or recovery action is shown.

Impact

• User confusion & wasted time waiting on a non-loading page.
• Broken trust in notifications (users learn some notifications lead to dead ends).
• Support overhead from “frozen” page reports that are actually deleted-resource cases.

Scope / Frequency

• Reproducible whenever a notification references a deleted Bill.
• Likely browser-agnostic.

Environment

• Web app → Notifications linking to Bills.
• Affects users with access to billing/receiving notifications.

Technical Clues (for triage)

• Likely unhandled 404/410 (deleted) or 403 (permission) response from the Bill fetch.
• UI remains in loading state due to missing error/empty-state handler on Bill detail route.
• Consider “soft-delete” vs. hard delete; route may need to check both.

Proposed Fix

• Add error handling on Bill load:
  • If 404/410/403, show an empty state with actions:
    • Primary: “Go to Bills”
    • Secondary: “Return to Dashboard”
    • Message: “This Bill is unavailable. It may have been deleted, moved, or you don’t have permission to view it.”
• Log telemetry for notification→deleted-bill navigations to quantify impact.
• Optional: Update the notification resolver to pre-check Bill existence and route to Bills list with a contextual banner when missing.

Workarounds

• Manually navigate to Bills list or associated PO/Task to continue work.
• No reliable in-page recovery once stuck on the loading spinner.