Status: Open for comments

Need

When the scaffolder is running a happy scenario everything works fine, but whenever the scaffolder is failing it throws general errors and logs, which is very confusing for end users.

We need a clear display of errors when the scaffolder is performing the stack of actions. We can show it in a similar way to how it's shown in other backstage components. Eg Picture:

Proposal

While scaffolding an error can come from multiple places, such as -

• Custom actions
• Built-in actions
• Connectivity issues
• Authorization issues
  et Cetra.

We can capture these errors in the ActionContext object and throw a user-friendly error, in a pop-up or an alert.

We can create a new property of type function inside ActionContext named throwError or showAlert or anything that the community suggests. So in every action, we fire the function whenever there is something going wrong ctx.showAlert("GitHub - failed to find the repository")

This can be achieved for all cases where we are getting an error returned from the API, even if we are not getting a definite error, we can still highlight to the user what part failed.

I believe the logs are good, but showing errors neatly is a better way to keep users engaged. My solution is quite raw right now , but I hope i was able to convey the idea.

An example of how errors are shown currently

How it can be made more UX Friendly