This adds to the `__le__` method on the `BroadcastMessage` class to
allow two BroadcastMessages with no `updated_at` to be compared.
Previously, the method expected at least one message to have
`updated_at` set, but this is not necessarily the case.
Broadcasts created by the API are different in that:
- they aren’t created by any user, so don’t have a `created_by_id`
- they are created instantly, not in steps, so don’t have an
`updated_at` time
This commit alters the views to account for when these pieces of
information aren’t present.
At the moment the admin app expects all broadcasts to have a template,
and expects the content of the alert to come from the template.
This commit makes it so those pages can still get a `Template` instance,
but populated with content straight from the `content` field in the
database.
We think that in some cases alerts will be composed in the moment, and
therefore making people first create a template is:
- not a good use of their time
- adding some conceptual complexity which they don’t need
This commit makes it possible to type some words and have them go
straight into the `content` field in the database.
In the future we might want to progressively enhance the radio buttons
so they show on the same page (like we do with the grey buttons on the
templates page).
We have lots of functions for converting various types of data into
strings to be displayed to the user somewhere.
This commit collects all these functions into their own module, rather
than having them cluttering up `app/__init__.py` or buried amongst
various other things that have ended up in `app/utils.py`.
`app/utils.py` is a bit of a dumping ground for things we don’t have a
better place for.
We now have a place and structure for storing ‘model’ code (‘model’ in
the model, view, controller (MVC) sense of the word).
This commit moves the spreadsheet model to that place.
On the uploads page we only show jobs which are within a service’s data
retention.
This commit does the same for when we’re listing the jobs for a contact
list. This matches the UI, which says a contact list has been ‘used
`<count_of_jobs>` in the last <data_retention> days’
Because we’re be grouping jobs under their parent contact lists it’s
good to have some information ‘scent’ to help people find their jobs,
ie by clicking into a contact list. It also lets you see which list have
been used more than others, maybe because the update hasn’t been sent
to that group of people yet.
The hint text under uploads always says when they were used. For contact
lists this is a bit more complicated, since they can:
- never have been used
- been used multiple times
This commit makes use of the new fields being returned by the API to say
determine when these messages are relevant. They also let us
differentiate between a contact list that’s never been used, and one
that has been used, but not recently enough to show any jobs against it.
It’s a bit unintuitive that starting a job from a contact list makes a
copy of the file, which has no relationship to the list it was copied
from. This is more of an implementation detail, rather than something
that comes from people’s mental models of what is going on. Or at least
that’s what I hypothesise.
I think it’s clearer to show jobs that come from contact lists within
the lists that they were created from. By naming the jobs by template
this gives a clearer view of what messages have been sent to the group
over time.
The view layer shouldn’t be having to deal with converting dates as
strings. This is an artefact of how we send data from the API to the
admin app. The model layer should be responsible for turning JSON into
richer types, where it can.
The responses we get to paginated queries from the API are fairly
consistent, so we should be able to reuse the code that takes JSON
from the API and turns it into Python objects. This commits factors out
that code so that it is reusable (by inheriting from it).
If a subclass of `JSONModel` defines a property then we shouldn’t try
to override it with the value from the underlying dictionary.
Rather than silently fail we should raise an exception because it will
help keep our list of `ALLOWED_PROPERTIES` nice and tidy.
For emails and text messages we sort by the time the user (or API) sent
them.
This makes sense for broadcasts too, since most users will receive the
alert within seconds of it being broadcast.
For alerts that haven’t started yet we can sort by `updated_at`, which
is when the user preparing the broadcast submitted it for approval.
We wrote custom `__getattr__` and `__getitem__` implementation to make
it easier to find code that was accessing fields in the dictionary that
we weren’t aware of. See this commit for details:
b48305c50d
Now that no view-layer code accesses the service dictionary directly we
don’t need to support this behaviour any more. By removing it we can
make the model code simpler, and closer to the `SerialisedModel` it
inherits from.
It still needs some custom implementation because:
- a lot of our test fixtures are lazy and don’t set up all the expected
fields, so we need to account for fields sometimes being present in
the underlying dictionary and sometimes not
- we often implement a property that has the same name as one of the
fields in the JSON, so we have to be careful not to try to override
this property with the value from the underlying JSON
Our style for areas is pale blue background with black keylines or bold
black text.
This commit makes the display of area names on the dashboard consistent
with that visual style.
This also means that we’re not truncating the list of areas, which is
appropriate because no one area is more important than any of the
others.
Broadcast services only have broadcast templates. But we show the
template type under the name of the template. This is redundant. It
would be better to preview the content of the template instead.
This then makes the templates page consistent with the dashboard.
Depends on:
- [ ] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/2996
We’ve had some feedback from user research that difference between
‘will get alert’ and ‘likely to get alert’ is not clear, and it’s hard
to tell if the latter is inclusive of the former. This leads people to
question the validity of these numbers, which is important, because an
the estimate should give you some idea of the impact of what you’re
about to do.
This commit reformats the number as a range, for example 1,000 to 2,000
phones.
If the range is small, eg 40,000,000 to 40,800,000 then this suggests
a false level of accuracy. So instead we just give one number and say
it’s an estimate, eg ‘40,000,000 phones estimated’
we want to keep track of all broadcast services across govt easily. As
such, when broadcasting is enabled for a service, we've decided we're
going to add the service to a special broadcasting organisation.
This organisation is defined in the config file. It's hard coded for
production, if you want to test locally, you should set
BROADCAST_ORGANISATION_ID in your local environment.
If you’re adding another area to your broadcast it’s likely to be close
to one of the areas you’ve already added.
But we make you start by choosing a library, then you have to find the
local authority again from the long list. This is clunky, and it
interrupts the task the user is trying to complete.
We thought about redirecting you somewhere deep into the hierarchy,
perhaps by sending you to either:
- the parent of the last area you’d chosen
- the common ancestor of all the areas you’d chosen
This approach would however mean you’d need a way to navigate back up
the hierarchy if we’d dropped you in the wrong place. And we don’t have
a pattern for that at the moment.
So instead this commit adds some ‘shortcuts’ to the chose library page,
giving you a choice of all the parents of the areas you’ve currently
selected. In most cases this will be one (unitary authority) or two
(county and district) choices, but it will scale to adding areas from
multiple different authorities.
It does mean an extra click compared to the redirect approach, but this
is still fewer, easier clicks compared to now.
This meant a couple of under-the-hood changes:
- making `BroadcastArea`s hashable so it’s possible to do
`set([BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…)])`
- making `BroadcastArea`s aware of which library they live in, so we can
link to the correct _Choose area_ page
At the moment there are some areas which have:
- a `count_of_phones` value of `None`
- no sub-areas
This is wrong, but until we fix the data the phone counting code needs
to handle this.
This commit:
- adds the `or 0` in the right place (where it will catch these areas
with missing data)
- adds a test which checks these areas, and compares them to other kinds
of areas
We need to give people a better feel for the consequences of
broadcasting an alert. We’ve seen in research that some users will
assume it is subscription based, or opt-in, rather than going to every
phone in the area.
I reckon that the most effective way to communicate this is to put some
numbers next to the areas, to give people an idea of how many people
will get alerted.
We can estimate how many phones are in an area by:
- taking the population of all electoral wards in that area
- multiplying it by the percentage of people who own an internet
connected phone[1]
The Office for National Statistics publish both these datasets.
The number of people who own an intenet connected phone varies a lot by
age. Since the population data for each ward is broken down by age we
can factor this in. Simplified, the calculation looks like this:
- take the _Abbey_ ward of _Barking and Dagenham_
- in this ward there are 26 people aged 80
- 40% of people over 65 have an internet-connected phone
- therefore 10 of these 80-year-olds would be likely to receive a
broadcast
- (repeat for all other ages)
These numbers won’t be exact, but should be enough to give people a feel
for the severity of what they’re about to do. We can see if they acheive
this aim in user research.
1. This is a proxy for the number of people who are likely to have a 4G
capable phone, because only 4G capable phones will be receiving
broadcasts to begin with
When creating broadcast message, or updating it.
We want to send simple polygons to API so we can
later relay them to the broadcast provider.
Test that update broadcast message sends polygons correctly
