Previously, the AJAX update for the dashboard was returning a big blob
of JSON with one key.
This commit splits it up to return:
- one key for each section of the page
- each containing a smaller chunk of HTML rendered from a partial
The jobs page was already working this way (pretty much) but just needed
a little tweaking to get it the same.
There are some common questions that keep coming up when users are
editing or creating templates. This commit adds a pattern for sections
of guidance which can be shown/hidden.
It then modifies the guidance as follows.
Change:
- guidance about placeholders; give an example about what to do and what
not to do (because the mistake we keep seeing people make is putting
the thing itself, not the name of the thing)
Add (pretty basic at the moment but a need for these has come out of
research):
- guidance about links
- guidance about message length for text messages
We can filter all notifications by status already. This commit reuses
the same code to filter the notifications for a job by status.
This means that, visually we can show the count on a job the same as
we do for all notifications, which is similar to how we show the counts
on the dashboard, so hopefully it feels like a bit more of a solid
thing.
This also applies to CSV downloads and AJAX updates, which will inherit
any filtering that their parent page has applied.
We have tables listing notifications on:
- the job page
- the ‘activity’ page
Previously that had subtly different information, in a different order.
This commit makes them exactly the same.
Sending notifications don’t have an `updated_at`. This causes the time
formatting to throw a wobly, because it doesn’t expect `None`.
This commit changes the template to also look for the `created_at`,
which all notifications have.
_The code for this is quite hacky and light on tests. But I’d really like to get
it in the app for the research tomorrow to see how well the feature works._
This commit changes the tour from being a set of static screens to some help
which guides you through the process of sending your first test message.
The theory behind this is that what users are really struggling with is the
concept of a variable, rather than the relationship between the placeholders and
the column headers. And like learning to program, the best way to learn is by
taking an example and modifying it to your own needs.
This means that when someone adds their first service we set them up an
example email template and an example text message template. Then there is a
guided, three step process where _all_ the user can do is send a test message to
themselves.
Once the message is sent, the user still has the example templates which they
can edit, rather than having to remember what they’re supposed to be doing.
Currently, when we update a section of the page with AJAX we replace the
entire HTML of the section with the new HTML. This causes problems:
- if you’re trying to interact with that section of the page, eg by
inpecting it, clicking or hovering an element
- (probably) for screenreaders trying to navigate a page which is
changing more than is necessary
This commit replaces the call to `.html()` with a pretty clever library
called diffDOM[1]. DiffDOM works by taking a diff of the old element and
the new element, then doing a patch update, ie only modifying the parts
that have changed.
This is similar in concept to React’s virtual DOM, while still allowing
us to render all markup from one set of templates on the server-side.
1. https://github.com/fiduswriter/diffDOM
When a table is showing the contents of a CSV file, it should look
something like a spreadsheet.
The minimally skeuomorphic way to do this is by adding row numbers.
This commit doesn’t
- make the row numbers monospace (it’s barely noticeable and doesn’t
reflect what actual spreadsheets do)
- make the first column heading ‘Row’ (again, doesn’t reflect how actual
spreadsheets work, and takes up more valuable space)
This is a first go at having the job page update without refreshing.
The approach I’ve taken is to do all the rendering of HTML on the server side,
rather than use a Javascipt templating engine like mustache. This ensures that
we don’t have to maintain two sets of templates.
So the approach is to split the job page into partials. These partials can then:
- be included in the job page to render the whole page
- be rendered indivudually and then returned as a blob of HTML inside a JSON
response
Then I’ve added a Javascript module which looks for areas of the page that should
be reloaded. For each area of the page it will poll a URL and re-render that
section of the page when it gets new HTML. It implements some throttling so that
API calls will never happen more frequently than 0.67 times/second.
