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2026-05-21 — Execution Steps: GitHub Actions-style scroll behaviour

Motivation

While a BLAST job runs (/blast/jobs/<job_id> → Execution Steps card), each step pane embedded mini scroll boxes inside the page:

  • HighlightedINI / HighlightedFASTA / generic <pre> in BlastFilePreview.tsx clamped content at 180 – 220 px with overflowY: auto, so input.fa and elastic-blast.ini previews showed inside a tiny scrollbar even though the backend already byte-capped the payload.
  • The live K8s log stream was sliced to the last 80 lines per phase in StepLogSection.tsx, hiding the bulk of the run output.

The combined effect was that opening a step felt cramped — the user had to scrub three nested scrollbars per step instead of just scrolling the page like GitHub Actions does.

User-facing change

  • Each step's expanded content (input.fa preview, elastic-blast.ini preview, generic file previews) now flows inline. The page scroll is the only scroll. Backend maxBytes (1000 / 10000) keeps the rendered height bounded by design.
  • Live log buffer per phase raised from 80 → 2000 lines. If a phase exceeds the cap, a single head marker [… 1,234 older lines trimmed] is prepended so the user knows older output existed; the most recent 2000 lines are kept.
  • Step collapse/expand semantics are unchanged: active and error steps auto-expand, completed / skipped / pending stay collapsed by default, and the user's explicit toggles are respected across step transitions.

API / IaC diff summary

None — pure frontend change.

File Change
web/src/components/BlastFilePreview.tsx Drop maxHeight + overflowY: "auto" from HighlightedINI, HighlightedFASTA, and the generic <pre> block; restate intent in a short header comment.
web/src/components/BlastStepTimeline/StepLogSection.tsx Replace the per-event .slice(-80) with a post-pass that keeps the last 2000 lines per phase and prepends a single trim marker when older lines were dropped.

Validation evidence

  • cd web && npm run build — clean, 10.3 s, no TypeScript errors.
  • Manual: open /blast/jobs/<id> for a running search; the preparing step shows the full input.fa preview without an internal scrollbar, configuring shows the full INI inline, and running retains a long tail of K8s log lines. When the cap is hit, the head marker appears.