Losing work - offline + session timeout

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing: If you are working in an intermittently offline environment - and then Asana times out your session you lose work.

Steps to reproduce:
Its hard to define exact steps, but i believe the following should work …

  • Login to Asana
  • Turn off WiFi
  • Make a bunch of changes on Asana, add some topics, rearrange some things, edit some text
  • Close laptop,
  • Come back tomorrow - open laptop, get the unhelpful message.

“To keep your work secure, your Asana session has timed out. To log back in, please refresh your browser, or hit Log In below.If you were in the middle of typing something, please close this message, copy the text, and then refresh. We apologize for interrupting your flow. Thanks for helping us keep Asana secure!”

Spend a while trying to remember all the changes you made, there is no “text” to copy, since what you were doing was all the usual Asana stuff of moving things around etc.

Log back in, give up and hope Asana didn’t unnecessarily lose anything important again.

What it ideally should do … put up a message. “We’ve timed out your session for security, don’t worry we havent lost anything, log back in and we’ll upload your changes”. Request a login, NOT require a screen refresh and then automatically upload all the offline changes.

Browser version: Firefox 66.0.3

Upload screenshots below:

2 Likes

Hi @Mitra_Ardron and sincere apologies for the trouble here. This does sound strange indeed; the web version of Asana doesn’t support offline work, so if you’re offline while making changes, you should see a “trying to reconnect” top banner, but you should not be prompted to log back in.

Unfortunately, these issues are difficult to troubleshoot via the Forum since we’ll need to ask you for some private information to troubleshoot; our support team should be in a better position to help. In order to efficiently investigate this further, could you please provide our support team with the following:

  • The URL of this thread so you don’t have to re-explain everything from the beginning
  • A screencast illustrating the issue would also be super useful if you’re able to reproduce the issue again. Loom is a great app for video screencasts: https://www.useloom.com/
    In your video screencast, we recommend that you use a Chrome Incognito window and have your Javascript console open:
    Browse in private - Computer - Google Chrome Help
    Chrome DevTools - Chrome Developers
    Try to include the entire browser window, including URL bar, in the video screencast.

Again so sorry for the inconvenience and for not being able to help further via the Forum, I hope this gets resolved soon!

Your response isn’t quite accurate … yes it doesn’t support offline work (and is a big deficiency of Asana) in the sense that it won’t retrieve new info but it does support edits to material in the project you have open and normally submits them when it reconnects. Something that is lost if the session timeout happens. (And for those of us on laptops, being offline isn’t unusual)