There’s no point in collapsing […] the email on the single template
page because it’s the only thing on the page.
Users will probably be going back and forth quite a bit to edit their
template and see the changes; they shouldn’t have to expanded it evey
time to check they’ve got the heading syntax right, for example.
A long email message needs to be collapsed to only show the first few
lines. The problem is that we were doing this by adding a class with
Javascript, meaning that the email wasn’t being collapsed until the
script in the footer ran.
This caused a jump in the page because the browser was painting the
whole email message, then repainting it once it was collapsed.
This commit takes advantage of the `.js-enabled` class added to the
`<body>` by a script in the `<head>` of GOV.UK template.
This means that the email message is collapsed with CSS before the first
paint of the page, so no jump.
This introduces some complexity in how we determine which emails get the
expander toggle. Because they’re already collapsed we can’t get their
height and work out if they’re long enough to need collapsing.
So we need to take a copy of the message, put it off-screen, expand it,
get its height, then remove it from the DOM. Bit of a faff.
Because of this there’s still a quick flash of the toggle if you see an
email message that’s too short to need collapsing. I think this is the
lesser of two evils—very short email messages will be few and far
between in the real world.
Depends on:
- [ ] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/40
In research we’ve noticed two problems with the appearance of
placeholders:
1. We are inconsistent about when we display the ((double brackets)).
Sometimes we show them, sometimes we don’t. This doesn’t help user’s
understanding about where the column names in their CSV file come
from, or how they can edit the template to fix any errors.
2. Because they look so different from normal `<textarea>` text, it’s
not immediately obvious that they can be edited just like normal
text. They look more like something that can be dragged/inserted.
So this commit:
1. Makes the brackets always-visible.
2. Makes the text colour of the placeholder `$text-colour`, and only
highlights the name of the ‘variable’, not the brackets themselves.
This commit refactors the `email_message` and `sms_message` UI components to
take fewer parameters.
`name`, `edit_link` and anything to do with versions are identical for both
text and email messages so I’ve moved them to the pages where you choose a
template or see the versions.
This commit also tidies up the wording and styling of the template history
stuff.
I don’t think that if there’s only one version of the template that it’s
useful to see the created at date.
The auditing stuff only becomes relevant once someone a template has been
changed.
When previewing a template on the send page, having the recipient appear
as a placeholder should help reinforce the relationship between the
columns in the CSV and the placeholders.
Then, when previewing a message, having the template populated with the
first recipient’s email address/phone number should reinforce that
relationship again.
It’s a bit silly to have email templates expandable if you’re only going
to reveal a couple more lines.
This commit adds a data attribute which specifies how high (in pixels)
the email template can be before it gets truncated. It then changes the
script to only truncate emails which are naturally taller than this
height.
Currently the cut off is at 200px, which is approximately 8 lines of
text: `200px / (font-size: 19px * line-height: 1.31) = 8.03`
Emails can get very long.
When you’re trying to do other things on the page this results in a lot
of scrolling.
This commit truncates email messages to about 3 lines, and adds a JS
toggle which reveal the full contents of the email.
The email pattern looked a bit shonky when displayed in a narrower column. This
commit fixes it by making the email’s metadata (eg subject, from) into a table,
which it sort of is. This means that it is more flexible about the size of
container in which it sits.
This commit adds a new page, which appears after a user enters the name for
their new service. It shows how the service name will appear in emails and
text messages.
This means that the new service is not created until after they have confirmed
that the name is appropriate in context.
This has also involved:
- visual changes to the ‘email template’ pattern, which wasn’t very refined
before
- removing a bunch of words from the enter service name page, because most users
don’t read them, and we reckon that showing a preview is a better way of
getting them to understand what is meant by service name
Still to do:
- validating the the generated email address for a service is unique (on the
API) side
- having the API return the generated email address, rather than determining it
in the admin app
This commit brings in the `Template` util, added here:
https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/1
It also does a fair bit of tidying up, which I’ve unfortunately squashed into
this one massive commit. The main change is moving 404 handling into the
templates dao, so that every view isn’t littered with `try: … except(HTTPError)`.
It also adds new features, in a prototypy sort of way, which are:
- download a prefilled example CSV
- show all the columns for your template on the 'check' page
If the templates page contains text messages and emails then there’s two ways it
could be structured:
- into two sections, all text messages first, then all emails
- emails and text messages interleaved, sorted by date
I think the second one is better. Imagine a situation where you mostly do emails
but have a few text messages. You’d have to scroll past the text messages to get
to your emails. Every time.
I reckon that the most commonly accessed templates will be the most recent ones.
