Fix #122 comment collapse

[junaidferoz]

I investigated the issue and fixed the frontend crash in the PDF highlights flow.

Root cause

1. When a comment was collapsed, we store a comment_state entry (state=1).
2. If that comment (or reply) was later deleted, the comment_state could still exist temporarily and reference a comment id that is no longer present in the frontend store.

PDFHighlights assumed that state.commentId always resolves to a valid comment and directly accessed:

comment.annotationId

This caused:

1. TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'annotationId')
2. Follow-up watcher/component update errors in PDFViewer
3. PDF view breaking after collapse + delete scenarios

Fix implemented (frontend)

In frontend/src/components/annotator/pdfViewer/Highlights.vue:

1. Made getAnnotationByCommentState(state) null-safe:

• return null if comment is missing
• return null if annotation is missing

2. Added guard logic in the commentStates watcher:

• skip processing when annotation is null
• avoid unsafe property reads on missing objects

Why this works

The component now safely ignores orphaned/stale comment_state references instead of throwing, so deleted collapsed comments no longer crash highlight/watcher updates and PDF rendering remains stable.

[dennis-zyska]

Hi, thanks for the fix. There are additional log files in the commit, that should not be on the branch. Please delete and check the .gitignore.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Fixes a frontend crash in the PDF highlights flow by making PDFHighlights resilient to stale/orphaned comment_state entries that reference deleted comments/annotations.

Changes:

• Made getAnnotationByCommentState(state) return null when the backing comment/annotation is missing.
• Added a guard in the commentStates watcher to skip processing when no annotation is found.
• Added several runtime log files under logs/ (activity/complete/error snapshots).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 1 out of 7 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
frontend/src/components/annotator/pdfViewer/Highlights.vue	Adds null-safety around resolving annotations from comment_state and guards the watcher path that previously crashed.
logs/activity-2026-03-17.log	Adds captured runtime logs (appears to be environment output).
logs/activity-2026-03-18.log	Adds captured runtime logs (appears to be environment output).
logs/complete-2026-03-17.log	Adds captured runtime logs (appears to be environment output).
logs/complete-2026-03-18.log	Adds captured runtime logs (appears to be environment output).
logs/error-2026-03-17.log	Adds an empty error log file.
logs/error-2026-03-18.log	Adds an empty error log file.

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[junaidferoz]

Hi @dennis-zyska,
I have made the changes as per your comment. Could you please check and let me know what to do next with regards to this issue.