Yeah, I couldn't come up with a reason why you'd bookmark this.

I could maybe imagine that you might have some internal tool that redirects to /batch/?ids=123 or whatever, or a bookmarklet that mangles Workboards, but you just need to replace /batch/ with /bulk/ if you do so that didn't seem like a huge issue. I don't have any direct knowledge of anyone doing this.

The many layers of hacks here are:

• buildApplicationCrumbsForEditEngine() itself is sort of a hack to just make crumb construction public. Maybe crumbs should just be public instead, or maybe there should be some other approach, but I'm not sure. I think there's a TODO on the method definition already.
• ...ForEditEngine(), but this is BulkEngine, but I didn't want to double-hack and add a ForBulkEngine() since ForEditEngine() is kind of bad enough already.
• The "Query" crumb should really say something like "Open Tasks" if you came in via a named query, but I punted because rendering the actual query name properly via SearchEngine is kind of a lot of code. Sometimes we don't have a real named query, and sometimes the cancel URI isn't a query at all. I'll probably let the subclass have some control over crumb construction so we can get Maniphest → Workboard XYZ → Bulk Editor or something like that. The behavior is also maybe a little weird if you just come in with a list of IDs.

None of this is too egregious but I expect it'll get at least a bit better soon.

Yeah, this is accurate.

There's currently no UI support for query-based bulk edits other than typing in the URI, but I think I'm going to at least move a little bit in that direction. One thing we could possibly do is get rid of the task selection in /maniphest/ and just do it here instead, since now we have tools for it. That's nicer if we add bulk edits to other apps, since we don't have to put the whole bulk edit UI and click-to-select interaction into everything.

Also, right now, it's hard to bulk edit tons of stuff. You can sort of do it in Maniphest by setting the query limit to 9999999 and then using "Select All", but at some point the page will fail, and most other apps don't have "limit". So if we made this more SearchEngine/Query oriented that might make support in other applications a lot less invasive.

I'm also imagining changing it so it works like this, to work better with larger result sets:

• If your query matches more than, say, 1K results, we just say "You're bulk editing more than 1,000 things. They will all be edited, but you can't individually add and remove items from this set since it would take too long to render the entire list into your browser."
• Then we just pass the query itself to the background task, and it spools up individual tasks for every matching object.

That would let the bulk editor operate on huge result sets without hitting scale issues. I'm not sure that's super valuable, but it's nice to at least have a reasonable plan for when someone does want to edit 1M tasks to add a disclaimer that Legal says is 100% necessary or whatever.

This is the part I haven't touched yet that's up next. It's, uh, TODO'd in my head. 🐑