Yea, sounds like we might be getting and exception somewhere.  I will have an outbound ticket created so the mail team can take a look.

Just wanted to provide an update on this.

 

In the support ticket we have traced the problem to an invalid value of the <BirthDate> property within the userConfig.xml file, within the <Contact> section.  The issue is that I had set my birthdate sometime prior to V16 and the value was saved as MM/DD/YYYY.  When I compared that with another account which did not have a birthdate set prior to V16, saving a new value in V16 goes in as DD/MM/YYYY.  So the month date date were reversed.

 

It's quite possible that this is a bug affecting *any* user that had set their birthdate prior to a V16 upgrade, where the month / day are reversed in the userConfig.xml file.  However, that would only cause an error if the user's day of the month for their birthdate is 13-31 (mine is in that range).  In addition, we are located in Canada although our servers are set to en-US - so some strange locale issues may be happening as well.  In any case, now that we've identified the root cause SmarterTools can figure out the extent of the problem and implement a fix.

 

So the reason this mattered is that there's a call to /api/v1/settings/user-mail which is used on the Calendar view as well as on the Settings pages (and others) which wasn't handling an invalid date exception and returning a Bad Request response.  Because of that response the rendering / javascript processing of affected pages would break.  Again, I think there's going to be lessons learned from this that will make SM16 better for everyone - so that's great.

 

I'm still back to the original request that's part of this thread though.  The z-index of the main navigation bar at the top of the page need to be higher than the loading modal because if there is a rendering / javascript / angular issue that causes the loading modal to stay activated there's no way for the user to navigate to a different page other than using the browser's back button.

 

Thanks to Derek & Robert for their support on this including providing a custom build to help with the diagnostics.

 

This bug still exists in Version 16.0.6369 (June 9).

 

to clarify - it's not the bug that was causing the loading modal to appear (that problem was fixed) - but it's the idea that the loading modal has a higher z-index value than the very top navigation bar.  There are still some pages where the loading modal shows, like on certain reports, and if the user wants to go elsewhere without waiting for the report / page to load they should be able to do that.

 

Seems like a simple fix - just increase the z-index value of the top navigation bar so that nothing ever overlays it.

 

This still exists in Version 16.0.6376 (Jun 16, 2017)

This still exists in version 16.0.6390 from June 30.

 

The good news is that with the latest version, the spinner shows up less frequently, but there's still times when it does.  For example, in my installation I go to Root -> Reports -> Incoming Spam and then change the Mode to Domains and that report takes about 25 seconds to load.  During which time I can't navigate anywhere else because the spinner overlays the entire screen.  Not a big deal if I'm patient enough to wait for the report to load, but it is a big deal if for whatever reason there's a failure and now the user can't do anything because the spinner blocks all navigation.

 

Simple solution, if possible, is to make the z-index value of the top navigation bar higher than that of the spinner.

 

Shaun,

 

This behavior is intended because you are in an operation that needs to be finished.

 

The operation might be that it is waiting for data from the server (internet speed) or it is processing something on the server.  It is very important that these operations finish uninterrupted because we also cache some of this data on the client as you move throughout the interface.

 

The spinner was appearing more often then it should until we found that bug in the routing component we were using.