Canceling previous requests in dropdowns

[jamesplease]

👋

Type: Bug

Description: Dropdown searches (such as for Notifications) are not canceled when a new search is entered. This can cause incorrect search results to be displayed in certain situations.

More info:

When a user types into a dropdown, slow backends can lead to multiple concurrent requests. Here is a screenshot showing this (these network requests are from searching for Notifications within the internal Netflix Lemur)

I'd expect to see something more like this:

This is a problem becomes requests may not resolve in the order that they were sent off. In the first screenshot above, the third request will return the results that the user is interested in. And although it was sent after the first two requests, there's no guarantee that it will return last.

To provide a specific example, consider a user searching for "Apples." They type it, and the request begins. They change their mind, and search for "Oranges." If the apples search isn't canceled, then it could be returned after the search for oranges.

Unless the UI app does some sophisticated tracking of requests, then the incorrect results will be displayed.

Suggested fix:

Aborting previous requests when a new request is initiated.

Thanks for reading!

---

(Note: I use the internal Netflix Lemur, and I'm not too familiar with this project, so I'm not sure if the Notifications dropdown is Netflix-specific)