Skip to content

BV2285 — finding an election by its ID, and the empty state that hides it

Sheet rows still needed. BV2285 was allocated as the next free id above the highest observed across the repos (BV2284, in the library's BV_registry.md) — it is not yet a row in the test-case sheet. Paste-ready: BV2285-sheet-rows.tsv. If it collides, renumber here and in the tsv together.

Why these four are one family

They came out of a single user action: an admin pasted an election ID into the only search box on /manage and got back "You don't have any elections yet." That one screen contains two independent defects, and one of them was hiding the other.

Defect Upstream
1 The Title box does not match the election ID, so the search finds nothing #1059 → PR #1524
2 A search that matches nothing renders the new-user empty state, so the page claims the account has no elections at all #1525

Fixing either one alone still leaves a bad screen: fix the search and a genuinely-unmatched query still lies about your account; fix the empty state and the ID still is not findable. They are filed separately because they are separate code, but they should be run together — that is what this family is for.

The cases

Case What it checks Status
BV2285a /manage, filter matches nothing → onboarding copy + CREATE ELECTION button Expected to fail. Read from source, not executed — see its provenance table
BV2285b /browse, filter matches nothing → "No open elections at this time" while three exist Expected to fail. Executed, screenshot below
BV2285c A genuinely empty account still gets the onboarding copy Passes today. Regression guard for the #1525 fix
BV2285d The Title box matches an election ID Fails today; passes on PR #1524

BV2285c exists because the obvious fix to #1525 — swapping the message — would break the case that is currently correct. A fix has to keep both.

Test data

Three open, public elections. Any three will do; these pages use ids that are easy to tell apart from title text:

Election ID Title
7mckyg Favorite betrayal in STAR, 1 of 2 — honest ballots
hb4qvv Flat ballot dropped as an abstention
2gvwr9 Nine-candidate tiebreak order

The IDs are real library elections (BV2206, BV2283, BV2262) so the titles carry meaning, but nothing here depends on their contents — only on an ID being a string that appears in no title. That last part is the point: if an ID happened to be a substring of its own title, the search would appear to work for the wrong reason.

The screen this family is about

Three elections listed:

The same page, one word typed into the Title filter:

0–0 of 0, and a sentence saying there are no open elections. There are three.

issues/1059-1524-search-elections-by-id.md also carries the display question this family does not test: whether the ID should be visible as well as searchable, and what that costs at 320px. Three prototypes are screenshotted there. No test case is written for it because nothing has been decided.