The breaking change page wasn’t properly accounting for the fact that
letter recipients span multiple columns – it was assuming they’d only
take up one column like they do for email and SMS.
This commit fixes:
- the number of column headers (A, B, C, …) to be correct
- the count of columns (you will need X columns in your file) to be
correct
It then parameterises the test to look at a case where a recipient is
in one column (email) and multiple columns (letter).
Not necessary to have it on its own page – it’s one line of stuff. And
definitely not as frequent use as the ‘Upload recipients’ or ‘Send
yourself a test’ links.
Letter templates have (or will have) multiple different editable
regions. I think that the most intuitive way for this to work is to have
- an edit link for each of these areas
- positioned next to the thing to be edited
Again, this isn’t fully hooked up, but since no-one is using letters
live yet this is a good way of getting research feedback and pointing
towards where we want the feature to go.
Uses percentages for the positioning so that the alignment is maintained
on mobile.
The links to the right of the template take up valuable horizontal
space. This means that the preview of email and letter templates isn’t
as big as it could be. By making the letter preview bigger it removes
the need to click through to the PDF to see a preview.
Reuses the navigation style used on the API integration page, because I
think it damages consistency to create another new button style.
The breaking change page temporarily holds the changes in hidden inputs
on the page. The messages content it gets from the `.content` property
on the subject. This is raw and not transformed in any way, so fine.
For the subject it gets the value from the `.subject` attribute on the
template. For email templates, this will be transformed to highlight
placeholders with `<span class='placeholder'>…`. This means that when
the change is confirmed, it’s this encoded version that gets sent to the
API. Which is bad, because we then save `<span class='placeholder'>` in
the database.
This commit changes the page to look at the `._subject` attribute
instead, which is the internal, untransformed version of the subject.
For some reason we were rebuilding `new_template` as a dictionary,
without the `placeholders` attribute. This meant that we were never
actually counting the placeholders, just counting the length of `None`
and adding 1 to it.
So this commit fixes that, beefs up the tests, and makes sure that
everything is pluralised properly.
Right now we have separate pages for email and text message templates.
In the future we will also have a separate page for letter templates.
This commit changes Notify to only have one page for all templates.
What is the problem?
---
The left-hand navigation is getting quite crowded, at 8 items for a
service that can send letters. Research suggests that the number of
objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2 [1]. So
we’re at the limit of how many items the navigation should have.
In the future we will need to search/sort/filter templates by attributes
other than type, for example:
- show me the ‘confirmation’ templates
- show me the most recently used templates
- show me all templates containing the placeholder `((ref_no))`
These are hypothetical for now, but these needs (or others) may become
real in the future. At this point pre-filtering the list of templates
by type would restrict what searches a user could do. So by making this
change now we’re in a better position to iterate the design in the
future.
What’s the change?
---
This commit replaces the ‘Email templates’, ‘Text message templates’ and
‘Letter templates’ pages with one page called ‘Templates’.
This new templates page shows all the templates for the service, sorted
by most recently created first (as before).
To add a new template there is a new page with a form asking you what
kind of template you want to create. This is necessary because in the
past we knew what kind of template you wanted to create based on the
kind you were looking at.
What’s the impact of this change on new users?
---
This change alters the onboarding process slightly. We still want to
take people through the empty templates page from the call-to-action on
the dashboard because it helps them understand that to send a message
using Notify you need a template. But because we don’t have separate
pages for emails/text messages we will have to send users through the
extra step of choosing what kind of template to create. This is a bit
clunkier on first use but:
- it still gets the point across
- it takes them through the actual flow they will be using to create new
templates in the future (ie they’re learning how to use Notify, not
just being taken through a special onboarding route)
I’m not too worried about this change in terms of the experience for new
users. Furthermore, by making it now we get to validate whether it’s
causing any problems in the lab research booked for next week.
What’s the impact of this change on current services?
---
Looking at the top 15 services by number of templates[2], most are using
either text messages or emails. So this change would not have a
significant impact on these services because the page will not get any
longer. In other words we wouldn’t be making it worse for them.
Those services who do use both are not using as many templates. The
worst-case scenario is SSCS, who have 16 templates, evenly split between
email and text messages. So they would go from having 8 templates per
page to 16, which is still less than half the number that HMPO or
Digital Marketplace are managing.
References
---
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
2. Template usage by service
Service name | Template count | Template types
---------------------------------------|----------------|---------------
Her Majesty's Passport Office | 40 | sms
Digital Marketplace | 40 | email
GovWifi-Staging | 19 | sms
GovWifi | 18 | sms
Digital Apprenticeship Service | 16 | email
SSCS | 16 | both
Crown Commercial Service MI Collection | 15 | email
Help with Prison Visits | 12 | both
Digital Future | 12 | email
Export Licensing Service | 11 | email
Civil Money Claims | 9 | both
DVLA Drivers Medical Service | 9 | sms
GOV.UK Notify | 8 | both
Manage your benefit overpayments | 8 | both
Tax Renewals | 8 | both
bump utils to 13.8.0
we still save the content as the user intended, and they'll still see
that content in the text field if they go to edit the template, but
the SMS previews will appear as they will on a user's phone
Use `it`/`they` depending on how many different characters you've used
Also don't wrap the message with quotes, as it looks confusing and
potentialy implies that you can't use apostrophes
mostly making sure that the correct user is set up. some minor changes,
such as giving the platform_admin service permissions (so that we can
test that platform admins can send letters)
We have a bunch of different styles of handling when function
definitions span multiple lines, which they almost always do with tests.
Here’s why an argument per line, single indent is best:
- cleaner diffs when you change the name of a method (one line change
instead of multiple lines)
- works better on narrow screens, eg Github’s diff view, or with two
terminals side by side on a laptop screen
- works with any editor’s indenting shortcuts, no need for an IDE
Also, trailing comma in the list of arguments is good because adding a
new argument to a method becomes a one line, not two line diff.
The url was not being properly formed, missing the tempalte_id, meaning the back button on the page did not work.
This fixes that, includes a check of the url for the back button.
We don’t want sanitized content going into the database, because
sometimes we need the content unsanitised. The path from admin to the
API is where the template goes on it’s way to the database. So let’s
make sure we’re not sanitizing it at this stage.
We can no longer trust that the content of templates stored in the
database is safe.
Utils now has code to sanitise the content of templates.
This commit:
- updates utils to bring this code in
- modifies some integration tests to make sure everything is working
(there are more extensive unit tests in utils)
There is a check that the template can not be created as priority if the user is not a platform admin.
There is a check that the template can not change the `priority` unless they are a platform admin.
Right now we can show what a letter template looks like as a PDF or PNG.
This commit completes the work so this is also possible when:
- showing a template with the placeholders replaced
- showing any version of a template
Also removes dependency on `Exception().message`, which was deprecated
in Python 2.6. See
97f82d565f
for full details.
The breaking change page was taking the rendered template and saving
that if the user confirmed the change. This meant that templates could
be saved with `<span class="placeholder">…</span>` in their subject line
for example.
This commit fixes it so that it uses whatever data the user submitted,
not the rendered version of this.
The PDF preview is all good, but it’s hard, finickeity and feels dirty
to embed a PDF in a web page. It’s a more natural thing to embed an
image in a web page.
So this commit adds another endpoint to return an image of a letter
template. It generates this image from the PDF preview, so the stack
looks like:
1. `template.png` (generated in admin)
2. `template.pdf` (generated in admin)
3. HTML preview (generated by a `Renderer` in utils)
4. `Template` instance
5. serialised template from API
6. Template stored in database
The library used to convert the PDF to an image is Wand[1], which binds
to ImageMagick underneath. So in order to get this working locally on a
Mac you will probably need to do:
`brew install imagemagick ghostscript cairo pango`.
To get it working on Ubuntu/EC2 is an exercise left to the reader…
1. http://docs.wand-py.org/en/0.4.4/
Previewing a letter is different to previewing an email or text message
because:
- a letter has a layout
- the layout is fixed, ie it doesn’t depend on the user’s device
- the ‘send yourself a test’ feature won’t be as useful because it has
a lead time, so the feedback loop will be much longer
For these reasons a HTML-only preview of the letter won’t be enough (we
don’t think). A PDF is more appropriate because:
- it can replicate the layout of the letter exactly
- it is a print format, so the user could even print themselves a copy
locally to get a feel for how it will look
This commit makes use of Flask WeasyPrint [1] to take a HTML
representation of the letter, convert it to a PDF and serve it back to
the user.
The actual work to generate the HTML and specify the layout is done in
utils, same as we do for rendering other messages.
1. https://pythonhosted.org/Flask-WeasyPrint/
Since you can’t really send or edit a deleted template we should show
a message telling you that the template has been deleted.
This is important because deleted templates still show up in the
template statistics.
When you edit a template, you’re probably going to do something with
it straight afterwards, eg send yourself a test.
We could make it easy to find the template you’ve just saved by putting
it at the top of the pile. This gets confusing for other reasons (order
of templates will constantly shift about).
So this commit changes the flow to take you to the single page for the
template you’ve just edited.
When a user adds or removes placeholders in their template we should consider
this a ‘breaking change’ and warn them accordingly.
Implementing this mostly relies on using
https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/37
Temporarily storing the new template until the user confirms that they want to
make the changes in done using hidden fields. This is a bit hacky, but the
complexity of making sessions interact with WTForms was just too much to handle.
This commit also changes the example spreadsheet that we show on this page to
look more like a spreadsheet.
A new permission has been added, view_activity, to resolve this issue.
Another pull request in notifications-admin will be required to update all users with a default permission of view_activity.
Templates now have:
- a type (email or sms)
- a subject (if they are email templates)
We don’t want two completely separate view files for email and SMS, because they
would have an enormous amount of repetition.
So this commit adds
- different templates for SMS and email templates
- different form objects for SMS and email templates
…and wires them up.
The ‘manage templates’ page was almost identical to the ‘send text messages’
page.
This commit consolidates them into one and makes them all hang together.
Part of this means tweaks to the javascript so that files upload as soon as
you’ve chosen them.
Since placeholders (almost) work now, it’s worth telling people what the syntax
is.
This commit also removes the ‘template type’ picker, since you can only create
SMS templates at the moment. This will be revisited when we start looking at how
you add an email template.
When the template content was renamed in
9ee8610da0 I missed doing the same change for the
delete template route.
This commit does the same fix, so that template content is still visible when
you’re about to delete a template (so you can make sure it’s the right one).
This doesn’t need to be a form—it’s not changing any data.
And having the primary action on the page as ‘Use this template’ it makes it
clear what the page is for.
