🧩 Feature Request: Status Indicator for Active Document Processing (Fetch Queue)

[hendkai]

Problem

Paperless-AI processes documents asynchronously—either after uploads or manual triggers. However, there is no visible feedback to indicate whether documents are currently being analyzed or how many are in the queue. This leads to:

• User confusion about whether processing has started.
• Misinterpretation of empty analysis results (“Did it work?”).
• Lack of visibility into system workload (“Is anything happening?”).

Proposed Solution

A status indicator in the UI that shows whether documents are currently being fetched/analyzed, and optionally how many are pending.

Backend

• New API endpoint /status/processing (e.g. via FastAPI) that returns:

  {
    "processing": true,
    "queue_length": 5,
    "active_document_ids": [123, 124]
  }

• When analysis begins, add documents to a processing list (in-memory or persistent); remove them when done.

Frontend

• In the main dashboard or document list view:

  • A spinner or banner: “Analyzing documents (5 pending)…”
  • Optionally: a tooltip or modal showing active document IDs or names.

• Poll the /status/processing endpoint every 3–5 seconds.

Optional Enhancements

• Simple log or timeline (e.g. “Document [Feature Request] Adding new tags #123 processed at 12:32”).
• Per-document status indicators (“Waiting / Processing / Done”).

Why is this useful?

• Better UX – Users see that the system is working.
• Prevents duplicate actions – Reduces unnecessary re-uploads or retries.
• Monitoring foundation – Enables future performance tracking or workload charts.

---

Potential Drawbacks & Mitigations

Risk	Mitigation
Slight performance impact from polling	Use throttling or consider WebSocket push
Race conditions on concurrent tasks	Use a thread-safe processing list or job queue

[clusterzx]

There is a super intuitive and very clear status what images is processed right now, right on the main dashboard?

[hendkai]

No. Only shows system idle while documents are fetched:

[clusterzx]

Thats just a counting how many documents are existing, as you have to paginate over the api in paperless-ngx. There is absolutly no need to show that to the user.

[hendkai]

Ok. Thats why its only a suggestion. I first thought nothing is working when i click on manual start.

[clusterzx]

No, no, no 😆 don't worry about it. Sometimes looking at the logs can raise questions rather than be helpful lol.