Provide users feedback when their entities are "disconnected" due to renaming/moving of source entity files

Feature Suggestion

Provide some kind of UI feedback on entity pages to alert the user that their entity is “disconnected” from their source entity file.

Possible Implementation

Detect that the associated location entity has been orphaned and apply a similar status to affected entities which we can use to create UI feedback that suggest that the user should unregister the location and reregister their moved entity file?

Context

When a user renames or moves their catalog-info.yaml file, the associated entity becomes “disconnected” and the user is unaware their entity is no longer being updated. See discussion with @freben for more details.

[freben]

This is actually not orphaning. It’s a failure to even begin to process the Location entity, which is not the same as functioning correctly + choosing not to emit the child entity.

Apart from that, yeah you have the right idea. You would essentially take what EntityProcessingErrorsPanel does, plus looking up the chain too.

The part of “looking up”, now how to do that… Hm I wonder what the best semantics are. You probably want to take the backstage.io/managed-by-location annotation and look up all entities that have the exact same value for that annotation. Then show all of their errors.

[freben]

See the comment here for some potentially related context. https://github.com/backstage/backstage/issues/6991

I poked around with this to get a feel for the end user experience. So as you note, the entity itself doesn’t get marked as no longer being able to update. Instead, the parent generated Location entity is the one that gets the error marker.

So just looking at the underlying entity, you actually can’t see that it’s having issues.

I know when we were drafting this, we discussed error propagation. The idea was not to put a marker on the entity itself, but rather to let the frontend pick out and show errors “up the graph” from the entity instead of just on the entity itself. So it would show both the entity’s own errors, if any, and the backing generated Location’s errors. I think that would be a reasonable frontend low hanging fruit kind of fix.

Was that clear enough? Typed in a slight rush, let me know if it sounds sensible. 😃