Odd Behavior with Macintosh Self Service after 10.27 Jamf Cloud Upgrade

After our DEV environment was upgraded to Jamf Pro 10.27 I did some testing and found a way to reliably replicate this issue. It has to do with the whether or not you have enough categories displayed under the Browse list to cause the scroll bar to appear in the lefthand sidebar. I think this is why it appears so sporadic at first because different Macs may have a different number of categories listed depending on how many Self Service policies are successfully scoped to them.

I didn't notice this at first because in our DEV environment we only had four categories in the Browse list. I found that once you have enough categories to show the scroll bar, around 18 to 20 including the built-in All category, you can easily and consistently trigger this behavior and temporarily fix it.

Steps to reproduce and work around
1. Quit Self Service.
2. Create one or more test Self Service policies scoped to all of your Macs (or just your test Macs if doing this in production) and check about 18 to 20 categories under the Categories section of the Self Service tab.
3. Open Self Service. If you have the scroll bar showing for the lefthand sidebar, the Categories list under Browse should be blanked out.
4. Expand the height of the Self Service window to cause the scroll bar to disappear. Quit and reopen Self Service. Your categories should now be displayed.
5. Shrink the height of the Self Service window to cause the scroll bar to appear again. Quit and reopen Self Service. Your categories should now be blanked out.
6. Rinse and repeat between 4 and 5 to consistently go back and forth between categories being displayed and being blank.

I successfully replicated this issue on macOS 10.3.6, 10.14.6, 10.15.7 and 11.2.1.

Got the issue on few computer too, randomly appearing and disappearing… Usually I ask users to type the software they are looking for in the search box.

@spalmer That is great you have been able to replicate this. If you haven't already, please open a ticket with Jamf to let them know. When I spoke with support, they were not able to replicate the issue. You should also ask them to tier your case to PI-009394

Great sleuthing :-)

@spalmer excellent work, you just gave me the idea as to what is going on!

I was able to replicate this issue just now. If you have enough categories visible to warrant the need for the scrollbars, and scrollbar visibility is enabled, the categories disappear.

Setting it to 'when scrolling' with an old school mouse connected fixes it.

Trackpads on MacBooks usually hide the scrollbars, so that would explain why I haven't seen it on any of my laptops.

Looks like the view isn't accounting for the extra space imposed by having visible scrollbars.

I just sent video of the issue being replicated to support

@nberanger Yes, I reported it to Jamf Support and pointed them to this thread. Unfortunately, it was after hours yesterday so I haven't heard back from them yet.

Awesome work all! I can confirm this behavior as well when set to 'Always' vs when set to any other value.

@jjordan_mica and @spalmer , I think Jamf should offer the two of you jobs :D

Or stop spending all their time & $$ trying to sell Microsoft ...

My guess is that their plan is to be acquired by MS.

I can concur. Completely replicable in my instance.

I have a client on a MacBook who needs to upgrade their computer OS (via Self Service).
They are experiencing this symptom.

Launch Self Service and all categories are gone
Expand the window size, restart Self Service and all categories are there
Shrink Self Service and force scrollbars did not resolve the issue.

Expanding the window size resolved the issue.

I was told by Jamf Support that this is due to be fixed in v10.28, which is currently in beta.

I wasn't clear whether that meant in the current beta 2, or whether we could expect a beta 3.

Holding on 10.27.0 on-prem upgrade until this is addressed. Glad I found this before pulling the trigger!

omg... I wish they'd issue a patch for this ASAP. Or maybe I can bill all my tickets about unable to use Self Service back to Jamf? Self Service is 99% of how upgrades and updates get to my users (can't push or cache to global mobile users since I can't know what their network speeds are in most cases).

the new Self Service is a disastrous mess... did they even bother to do any testing?

I have the same issue on My iMac but not the MacBook Pro. Both running Big Sur.

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is there any progress on this, im seeing it widespread at a school. I need students to download software for their classes

Jamf have confirmed that there are two Self Service category-related issues at play here - one apparently is already fixed and the other is due to be fixed before v10.28.0 is released. If you are in the Beta Program there are some discussions on those forums.

Were these issues fixed in 10.28 or 10.29?

@elsmith Yes, I can confirm that this issue was fixed in 10.28 with Self Service.

@john-hsu Thank you!!!

I am seeing a similar issue, where some categories are not displaying, where some are. They are properly scoped (in my case, a script to update my browsers, the whole Browser category won't display in Self Service) to the machines that need this. Also, even if I tag this in the "Featured" category, it won't display. There are other items there, but not anything from the Browser category.