Deep-review round 5, over round 4's own fixes.
- `notifyActionError` preferred the server's `detail` over the caller's translated fallback, and
`reportFailure` deliberately leaves 403/404/429 to the caller — so for exactly those statuses the
dozen call sites round 4 converted started printing whatever English a route hand-wrote into an
otherwise Hungarian UI ("No user with that email.", "Not subscribed to this channel", "Unknown
job"). A STRUCTURED detail is still preferred: `req` has already run it through `localizeDetail`,
so it is both localized and more specific. A plain string is not.
- The other half of the same defect, on the backend: round 4's `get_or_404(what="channel")` sweep
reached exactly ONE of the five identical sites in channels.py and shipped the HU/EN string with
it, so the Block button said it in Hungarian and the four controls beside it in English. All five
are converted, and the subscription / share-recipient / scheduler-job 404s with them (two new
reasons in both locales).
- `PlexCollectionEditor`'s add/remove, take-over and delete were try/finally with no catch — in the
very file round 4 edited to give `createNew` one. 403 and 404 are the caller's to report, so the
tick simply never appeared and a CONFIRMED "delete collection" did nothing, silently.
- `UploadDialog` is the only `uploadReq` caller and kept an empty catch whose comment still claimed
the global error modal had it. It had not since `reportFailure` became shared: a proxy 502 raised
only the self-clearing connection notice and a 413/403/404 nothing at all, so the dialog snapped
back to its pre-upload state with no error named. The user's own Cancel stays silent — and since
a cancel and a network drop both carry status 0, that difference is now a named `isAborted`
rather than a string literal at each end.
Regression tests for each (5 vitest, 2 pytest, plus two existing assertions corrected), all
mutation-checked: 6 mutations, each red on the assertion it is named after. vitest 1007,
pytest 1127.
Backend conventions
The rules below are already followed across backend/app — they lived only in a few module
docstrings (demo.py, userscope.py, routes/_common.py) until this file collected them (E3 S3,
B-core-20). When you add code, match these so the next reader doesn't have to guess "which pattern do
I copy".
Module layering
Three layers, by who runs the code — not by feature:
-
routes/…— request-only. A route module holds HTTP concerns: auth dependencies, request/ response models, status-code mapping, serialization. It owns logic that runs only on a request. Business logic that a request happens to trigger does not live here if anything else runs it too. -
plex/,downloads/,sync/— domain logic shared by more than one caller. Anything the scheduler or the worker runs (not just a request) lives in one of these domain packages, so the route, the worker, and the scheduler share one definition. Examples from this codebase:downloads/service.pyowns enqueue + the job state transitions (routes call it);plex/sync.pyis run by both the admin route and the scheduler;downloads/pipeline.pyis the worker's child pipeline. -
Flat
app/*.pycore modules — cross-cutting primitives.auth,sysconfig,quota,audit,notifications,userscope,realtime,ratelimit,progress, … are single-file primitives many layers import. They depend on nothing above them (a core module must never import aroutes/…module).
Extraction trigger: the SECOND consumer. Keep new logic inline in its first caller. The moment a second caller needs it (a worker as well as a route; a scheduler as well as a route), extract it down a layer — into the relevant domain package, or a flat core module if it's cross-cutting. Don't pre-abstract for a single caller; don't leave shared logic duplicated once there are two.
Transaction ownership
This follows CLAUDE.md's canonical rule verbatim — "the handler/job-wrapper commits; helpers flush
(only quota owns its session)" — so read it that way, not as an exception to it. The commit belongs
to the operation owner; anything called inside another transaction only stages its change
(db.add / flush) and lets the owner commit, so the whole operation is one transaction.
audit.record() is the reference: it adds the audit row and the caller commits it together with the
mutation it records, so an audit entry can never exist without its change (or vice-versa).
- The operation owner is usually the route handler. A
service.*operation the handler delegates a whole transition to (e.g.service.cancel) is that owner and commits its one transition — it isn't a mid-operation helper. A helper that owns its OWN short-lived session (the worker'sjobdbwrites, the same carve-out CLAUDE.md grantsquota) commits that session. Everything else flushes. SessionLocalisexpire_on_commit=False: after a rawUPDATE+ commit, an ORM object you already loaded is stale. Read the fresh value from the row (RETURNING, or a re-SELECT), not the ORM attribute — seeservice.decr_ref_count.
Shared counters and status: do it atomically at the DB
- Never read-modify-write a shared counter in Python (
x.count = x.count + 1). Concurrent sessions lose an update. Use a DB-atomic statement —col = col + 1, orgreatest(col - 1, 0)withRETURNINGso the caller branches on the post-value under the row lock (service.incr_ref_count/decr_ref_count). - Download job status is a
JobStatusStrEnum (downloads/status.py), not bare strings. TheHOLDINGset defines which states hold aMediaAsset(so release accounting stays correct);STOPPED_BY_ROUTEis the route-initiated stop set. A worker child's terminal write goes throughservice.finalize_if_running(an atomicUPDATE … WHERE status='running') so a finishing child can't resurrect a job a route just stopped.
Config: one home per kind
app.config.settings— boot/env config (DB URL, download root, worker concurrency): read once at startup, not user-tunable at runtime.sysconfig.SPECS— the runtime admin knobs (DB-override-or-default). A new admin-tunable value goes inSPECS; don't invent a fourth store. (state.py'smaintenance_batchpredates this and is slated to fold intosysconfig— do not add more like it.)
The gate
Everything below must be green before a change is done (run via siftlode check):
ruff (backend) · tsc ×3 + eslint + prettier + knip (frontend) · vitest · pytest. The
pytest lane runs in backend/docker-compose.test.yml — an ephemeral Postgres + the backend tree
bind-mounted — so the DB-backed integration tests (the db fixture) actually run; SIFTLODE_TEST_ REQUIRE_DB=1 there turns a would-be silent skip into a hard failure. See docs/development.md.