Stuck on document generation screen when returning to background-created documents

[ekressmiller]

MLH's divorce complaint tool
uses background processing to generate the documents at the end of the interview.

After some time has passed (exact amount of time unclear), if you go to the My Forms/My Interviews page and select a divorce complaint that is at 100% (already reached download screen) after some time has passed:

You will often get to this screen and just stay there indefinitely (have tested out to like 25 minutes):

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Completely finish an interview using background processing to create documents
2. Allow time to pass (try at least a day?)
3. Go to the My Interviews page and select that interview again
4. See indefinite form creation screen

Expected behavior
forms should already be there because they were already generated, or, if they need to be regenerated, they should generate in a reasonable amount of time

Version Information (should be in your.docassemble.server/updatepackage:

• Docassemble Version: 1.9.8.post3
• AssemblyLine Version: 4.5.1 (updated from Main at some point)

[ekressmiller]

@plocket believes the celery task may be resetting/disappearing (or something to that effect) after 24 hours. @nonprofittechy had some thoughts about approaches.

[plocket]

I may have been mistaken about the standalone background_action() function, which is, I think, the way we implemented this behavior. The documentation I eventually found was about the BackgroundAction class:

Before returning the value, bg resets its state. Thus, if bg.run() is called again, a new background task will be started. The fact that bg resets its state when bg.run() returns a value means that you need to be careful to write your interview logic so that bg.run() is not run again unless you actually want a new background task to be spawned.

Still, I've mentioned that possibility in the chat and we can see if anything comes of it
̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄