The instance toolbar
The small floating bar over a running instance — what it tells you, resetting the session, and getting back out.
A small bar floats over every instance. It belongs to Midstream, not to your app, and it is the only thing on the page that is not your own code. This article covers what each control does.
Where it is
The bar sits in the bottom-right corner of the page. Drag it by the logo on its left edge and it stays where you put it — the position is remembered in that browser, so it will not creep back over the button you were trying to look at.
It renders in an isolated shadow root, so your app's CSS cannot restyle it and its styles cannot leak into your app. It appears on HTML pages served through the instance, once your app is up and answering.
Live copy
The first time a browser opens any instance, the bar introduces itself: a panel naming the scene you are in, the project it belongs to, and when the capture was taken. It says the copy is yours alone and that nothing you do in it is saved. Dismiss it and it will not open itself again in that browser.
After that, Live copy is a button. Click it to read the same panel again, and to reach Start over and Leave without hunting for them.
This exists because most people who open an instance have never seen Midstream. They followed a link from a pull request into an app they may not recognise, and until they are told, a floating bar over someone else's software is one more thing to be wary of.
Reset
The circular arrow throws away the session you have built up in the instance. You get a confirmation dialog first, because everything you have done in the instance goes with it. Confirm, and the page reloads; the captured cookies, localStorage, and sessionStorage are seeded into your browser again on the instance's next deploy. The same action sits on the instance's menu on the scene page, if you would rather do it from the dashboard.
Anyone who can open the instance can reset it, whether or not they are signed in to Midstream. It only puts the copy back the way it was captured, and they were already free to click anything inside it.
What reset covers is the browser half of the session. It does not roll back what your app wrote on its own side: rows your clicking created, files it uploaded, a queue it filled. When you want both halves back at the captured moment, destroy the instance from the scene page instead and open it again — the next open builds a fresh one from the capture.
Leave
The last control is the way out, and where it takes you depends on who you are. If you are a member of the workspace that owns the instance, you land on the scene's page in Midstream, with its instances, comments, capture history, and deploys. If you are not — a reviewer, a prospect, whoever the link reached — you get a short page explaining what you were just looking at.
The menu
The ellipsis holds two more links, both opening in a new tab so you do not lose the instance you are standing in:
- View Pull Request — the pull request this instance's commit came from. Only shown when there is one.
- Report an Issue — tell us when the instance itself misbehaves, as opposed to the app inside it.