Broadcasting is not a precise technology, because:
- cell towers are directional
- their range varies depending on whether they are 2, 3, 4, or 5G
(the higher the bandwidth the shorter the range)
- in urban areas the towers are more densely packed, so a phone is
likely to have a greater choice of tower to connect to, and will
favour a closer one (which has a stronger signal)
- topography and even weather can affect the range of a tower
So it’s good for us to visually indicate that the broadcast is not as
precise as the boundaries of the area, because it gives the person
sending the message an indication of how the technology works.
At the same time we have a restriction on the number of polygons we
think and area can have, so we’ve done some work to make versions of
polygons which are simplified and buffered (see
https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/769 for context).
Serendipitously, the simplified and buffered polygons are larger and
smoother than the detailed polygons we’ve got from the GeoJSON files. So
they naturally give the impression of covering an area which is wider
and less precise.
So this commit takes those simple polygons and uses them to render the
blue fill. This makes the blue fill extend outside the black stroke,
which is still using the detailed polygons direct from the GeoJSON.
dnspython had been changed from 1.16.0 to 2.0.0 in a previous commit,
but this was not compatible with eventlet 0.25.2. This bumps eventlet to
a later version, which has the effect of downgrading dnspython again.
https://github.com/alphagov/gds_metrics_python/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#021
This will mean that if an exception is thrown in any `before_request`
functions that run before the gds metrics `before_request` function,
then we will no longer throw an uncaught exception.
Note, this could still be the case (and has been seen in production) as
`init_app(application)` in `create_app` in `init.py` can indeed throw
exceptions, for example when it can't find the current service. We could
move our init app for gds metrics further up if we wanted to to further
counter this.
These are just so we have some pages to click through for now. They
don’t use real templates, or any of the broadcast stuff from the
database.
But I think it’s useful to get some skeleton pages in first so that we
can see the map etc working in production, then build on that, without
having to do it all in one mega PR.
For that reason there are two short term things I’ve done in this commit
which should be revisited soon:
- no tests for the endpoints
- data about which areas are selected is stored in the session
Brings in:
- re-usable `SerialisedModel`
- speed improvements to processing CSVs against email templates
I chose not to rename `JSONModel` or `ModelList` to keep the diff nice
and small.
At the moment this won’t look like much, but it will let us do an
end-to-end run of adding a broadcast template.
At the moment all you can do with a broadcast template is edit it, so
there’s no ‘Send’ link on the page.
0.6.0 has been withdrawn because it contained a bug (which wouldn’t
affect us). But we can’t use it now because pip can’t find it to
install. So needs upgrading to the next version now.
For services with permission, they can now put international addresses
into their spreadsheets without getting a postcode error.
This also means they can start using address line 7 instead of postcode,
since it doesn’t make sense to put a country in a field called
‘postcode’. But this will be undocumented to start with, because we’re
not giving any real users the permission.
It does now mean that the number of possible placeholders (7 + postcode)
is greater than the number of allowed placeholders (7), so we have to
account for that in the one-off address flow where we’re populating the
placeholders automatically. We’re sticking with 6 + postcode here for
backwards compatibility.
Our rules about address columns are relaxing, so that none of them are
mandatory any more. Instead you just need any 3 of the 7 to make a valid
address.
This commit updates our error messaging to reflect that.
This involves three changes which broke our code.
To validate email addresses, the optional dependency `email-validator`
must be installed<sup>1</sup>. But since we don’t use WTForms’ email
validation, we shouldn’t need to subclass it – it can just be its own
self contained thing. Then we don’t need to add the extra dependency.
When rendering textareas, and extra `\r\n` is inserted at the beginning
<sup>2</sup>. Browsers will strip this when displaying the textbox and
submitting the form, but some of our tests need updating to account for
this.
The error message for when you don’t choose an option from some radio
buttons has now changed. Rather than just accepting WTForms’ new
message, this commit makes the error messages like the examples from
the Design System<sup>3</sup>. By default it will say ‘Select an
option’, but by passing in an extra parameter (`thing`) it can be
customised to be more specific, for example ‘Select a type of
organisation’.
***
1. https://github.com/wtforms/wtforms/pull/429
2. https://github.com/wtforms/wtforms/issues/238
3. https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/radios/#error-messages
Looks like someone in the Ministry of Justice has made a nice little
Python package of them.
I’ve configured it to use the cached holidays that come with the
package, rather than going to the GOV.UK website every time we start the
app. This should be more reliable, and means we’ll only get updates when
we do a version bump (PyUp should keep an eye on this for us).
