Times shows as "started" in other tabs after you have stopped it

[fulldecent]

Describe the issue

Test case:

1. Open your instance
2. Start time tracking using button on header of screen
3. Open a second tab of your instance
4. Stop time tracking on the second tab
5. Go back to the first tab

Expected:

The time tracking widget shows that time is not tracking.

Actual:

The time tracking widget shows that time is still tracking.

Proposed solution:

A local storage, or possibly session storage, is a way for the application to communicate with itself between different tabs. This can be polled once per second without any performance impact.

I already tried

• I've read and searched the documentation.
• I've searched for similar issues in this repository.
• I've searched for similar issues in the discussions.

Kimai version

2

How do you run Kimai?

KIMAI CLOUD

Which PHP version are you using?

8.1

Logfile

No response

Screenshots

[kevinpapst]

This can be polled once per second without any performance impact.

Brave! Now tell me how to achieve that with thousands of open tabs/sessions.

Closing, duplicate of #3620

[fulldecent]

This is NOT a duplicate of #3620. That addresses when you have one session open on one device and the same customer logged in on another device.

Instead, this issue addresses when the same person has two tabs open and logged in on the same browser.

---

I assume your question is being facetious. But I'll provide an answer.

1. First, buy a Mac Studio configured with 192GB of RAM.
2. Update Chrome source code to allow you to open 2,000 tabs on your computer.
3. Open 2,000 tabs of the Kimai website on your computer in the same browser.

The above is the facetious part. Now is the important part:

4. On one of the tabs start timing.
5. When start timing, set a local storage with localStorage.setItem('timerstatus-user1234', 'last-updated-198342589724597-status-on'); where that number is the unix time that tracking started.
6. In every other browser tab, query once per second with localStorage.getItem('timerstatus-user1234'). If during that query, the information in session storage is newer that the information currently in that tab (see timestamp), update the tab and set the favicon.

I think you can also do this for push notifications between tabs:

// Listen for storage changes
window.addEventListener('storage', function(event) {
    if (event.key === 'timerstatus-user1234') {
        console.log('New value: ', event.newValue);
    }
});

Please note that setting and getting this value causes zero network traffic to your server. And it does not leak any information during other page requests. It is NOT a cookie.

This approach above and/or BroadcastChannel is best practice and it is currently how Gmail and other web apps will manage communication between multiple tabs in the same browser window.

[kevinpapst]

I assume your question is being facetious

No, I didn't see the localstorage part.
I was talking about thousands of users on different computers.
I just saw "poll every second" and was thinking "how in the world can should a server not be impacted by such a task"?

It is NOT a cookie.

That's patronising. Your communication is at the edge of being rude. Please try to work on that.

this issue addresses when the same person has two tabs open and logged in on the same browser

That only covers 80% of the use-cases, but that's likely enough...
Still many issues with this approach, eg.g using an app and a desktop browser in parallel.

I am just not sure if the idea is feasible. What if someone has two tabs open deliberately. Say, currently writing down some new tasks or updating customer data in a modal.
Not sure if I can simply change certain parts of the page without breaking the current situation.
But its a very simple and therefor good approach. I'll give it a try. Thanks for sharing 👍