Login Flow State Machine Simulator

Problem Narrative

You’re building a fintech mobile web app (millions of DAUs) where login reliability directly impacts revenue and regulatory access controls. The UI is implemented in React, but the team keeps shipping subtle bugs: users get stuck in “loading”, retries don’t reset error banners, and rapid clicks trigger duplicate requests.

To make the behavior testable, you decide to model the login flow as a deterministic state machine and write a pure function that simulates the UI state transitions given a sequence of events.

Formal Problem Statement

Implement a function:

• Input:
  • events: List[str] — a chronological list of events.
  • max_retries: int — maximum number of retries allowed after failures/errors.
• Output:
  • Return a tuple (final_state, attempts, message) where:
    • final_state is one of: "IDLE", "LOADING", "SUCCESS", "FAILURE", "ERROR", "LOCKED"
    • attempts is the number of login attempts started
    • message is a user-facing string describing the final outcome

Events

Each event is one of:

• "SUBMIT" — user clicks “Log in”
• "RESOLVE_SUCCESS" — server responds with success for the in-flight attempt
• "RESOLVE_FAILURE" — server responds with invalid credentials for the in-flight attempt
• "RESOLVE_ERROR" — network/5xx error for the in-flight attempt
• "RETRY" — user clicks “Try again”
• "CANCEL" — user cancels the in-flight attempt (e.g., navigates away)

State Transition Rules

1. Start in IDLE with attempts = 0 and retries_used = 0.
2. SUBMIT in IDLE, FAILURE, or ERROR starts a new attempt: state → LOADING, attempts += 1.
3. While in LOADING, only RESOLVE_SUCCESS, RESOLVE_FAILURE, RESOLVE_ERROR, and CANCEL affect state:
   • RESOLVE_SUCCESS: state → SUCCESS
   • RESOLVE_FAILURE: state → FAILURE
   • RESOLVE_ERROR: state → ERROR
   • CANCEL: state → IDLE (attempt is considered started already; do not decrement attempts)
4. RETRY is valid only in FAILURE or ERROR:
   • If retries_used < max_retries, then retries_used += 1 and state → LOADING, attempts += 1
   • Otherwise state → LOCKED
5. Once in SUCCESS or LOCKED, all subsequent events are ignored.
6. Any event that is not applicable in the current state is ignored.

Notes / Clarifications

• attempts counts every time you enter LOADING due to SUBMIT or RETRY.
• RESOLVE_* events when not in LOADING are ignored (stale responses).
• This models common React login flows (loading spinner, error banner, retry button) but must be implemented as a pure algorithmic function.