Show dashes for guest/pending users

[nutjob4life]

🤔 Tell Us About the Feature

This ticket describes requirements for handling guest/pending users (i.e., users with no group memberships). One of the challenges is how to show summary file information when the /files/select endpoint is protected against such users.

When the UI's user is not allowed to call /files/select, the UI causes repeated HTTP Basic auth challenges as it attempts to get a summary for each row.

🎇 What Solution You'd Like

@dcrichto1 suggested showing dashes in places of the counts of files and total file sizes for guest/pending users, replacing the numbers in the magenta oval in this picture:

〽️ Alternative Ideas

?

🗺 Context

• Overreaction to VDP-2979 jpl-labcas/backend#33
• Staff call 2026-08-11

[nutjob4life]

The backend on labcas-dev is now updated to handle requirements for handling different classes of users. This has affected several permissions and behaviors of the backend, but notably, the /files/select endpoint is protected.

If there is a pending users logged in, the UI will get 401s, 403s, or similar on that endpoint, which the browser turns into an HTTP Basic Auth challenge like this:

@dcrichto1 suggests that when there's a pending or guest user, the UI should not query the backend for summaries for total number of files or total size (thus removing the HTTP Basic Auth challenges) and showing dashes (such as hyphens "-", en-dashes "–", or em-dashes "—") in place of such information.