With the change in implementation in the previous commit, any error
(eg server responds with `500`) would cause the page to not be updated
again.
This is better than the previous implementation, whereby the browser
would re-request as fast as it could until it got a successful response.
This commit handles errors by clearing the render queue if the server
returns an error. So:
- Any updates that would have been performed based on this request are
dropped
- Subsequent updates will be attempted as if it was the first load of
the page, ie after a delay of `x` seconds
The `updateContent` module updates a section of the page based on an
AJAX request.
The current implementation will poll every `x` seconds. If the server
takes a long time to respond, this results in a the browser queuing up
requests. If a particular endpoint is slow, this can result in one
client making enough requests to slow down the whole server, to the
point where it gets removed from the loadbalancer, eventually bringing
the whole site down.
This commit rewrites the module so that it queues up the render
operations, not the requests.
There is one queue per endpoint, so for
`http://example.com/endpoint.json`:
1. Queue is empty
```javascript
{
'http://example.com/endpoint.json': []
}
```
2. Inital re-render is put on the queue…
```javascript
{
'http://example.com/endpoint.json': [
function render(){…}
]
}
```
…AJAX request fires
```
GET http://example.com/endpoint.json
```
3. Every `x` seconds, another render operation is put on the queue
```javascript
{
'http://example.com/endpoint.json': [
function render(){…},
function render(){…},
function render(){…}
]
}
```
4. AJAX request returns queue is flushed by executing each queued
render function in sequence
```javascript
render(response); render(response); render(response);
```
```javascript
{
'http://example.com/endpoint.json': []
}
```
5. Repeat
This means that, at most, the AJAX requests will never fire more than
once every `x` seconds, where `x` defaults to `1.5`.
The first column of a table is a heading, and will always be 50% wide.
It makes the table harder to scan when the information in the first
column breaks onto multiple lines, and introduces uneven whitespace in
the table.
This commit adds some CSS to force things in the first column to only
ever be one line. If they are too long to fit, they get truncated with
an ellipsis (`…`)
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.
The first columns of our tables are always headings for the
subsequent columns, even though they go horizontally.
HTML has the `<th>` tag, which doesn’t just have to be used for headings
along the top of a table. So this commit changes the first column to be
a `<th>`.
This then allows us to style these elements differently, specifically
making them 50% wide. This makes pages like the dashboard align more
nicely.
If the notification has come from an API call, the template is the
only thing that exists
If it’s a job, then we need to tell you name of the file. But you can
click though to see the template.
- _Processed_ is all the notifications that we know about, ie sending,
failed and delivered
- _Sending_ is notifications that we have either put into a queue or are
waiting to hear back from the provider about.
The big numbers on the dashboard are a count of all the messages we’ve
processed. So when you click them, the table of notifications you see
on the dashboard should contain that number of notifications.
This also gets the activity page one step closer to being like the job
page:
| Before | After
---------|----------------------------|---------------------------------
Activity | Sending, failed, both | Processed, sending, failed, delivered
Job page | Sending, failed, delivered | Sending, failed, delivered
The link to download a CSV of notifications looks like
`/endpoint?download=csv`. This not not very web idiomatic.
The service manual recommends:
> Only use query strings for URLs with unordered parameters like options
> to search pages.
The CSV is a different representation of the same data, it does not
perform searching or filtering on the data.
The proper way (as we do elsewhere in this app) is to put an extension
on the endpoint to indicate an alternate representation, eg
`/endpoint.csv`
Downloading a CSV of notifications is very similar to viewing them on
a webpage. So I think it’s sensible to move the assertions about the
CSV download link into the same test, rather than it being it’s own
test.
This means being able to reuse the parametrization introuced in this
commit’s parent.
This commit splits the activity page into two pages, one for emails
and one for SMS.
Technically this means moving from having template type in the
querystring and putting in it the URL, eg:
*Before*:
`/services/abc/notifications/?template_type=sms`
*After*:
`/services/abc/notifications/sms`
This commit changes the activity page to only have controls
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.
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.
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.
For the button on the check page, we need to be able to say ‘1 text message’ or
‘55 emails’. We already have the logic to do this on the dashboard (101 text
messages sent), and it’s already in a component. So this commit makes the check
page use the same component.
We have a couple of places now where we want nice lists made from `list`s, eg
- ‘name’, ‘date’ and ‘phone number’
- ((firstname)) ((lastname)) or ((date))
This commit adds a more generic component for doing this, which can handle:
- 1, 2, and n items
- comma (or other character) separated lists
- a conjunction between the last and one-before-last item
- characters to be inserted before and after each item, eg an opening and
closing HTML tag
It also pulls the `list_of_placeholders` component from the breaking change
page, and makes it use the `formatted_list` component under the hood.
Row-level errors are:
- bad phone number/email address
- missing data
I think it’s distracting to show these on the page if there’s something more
fundamentally wrong with the file, eg placeholders don’t match.
So this commit makes sure that these error messages are only displayed when the
top-level error says ‘There is a problem with your data’
This commit rearranges the CSV errors (again) to make them geared towards
teaching you how to match placeholders to the column headers.
So the order of errors now is:
1. No phone number/email column
2. Column headers don’t match placeholders
3. Missing or bad data
4. Trial mode
5. Daily limit reached
This depends on:
- [x] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/39 for 1.
‘How to format your file’ sounds complicated and incidental.
‘See an example’ sounds like something that might be useful if you’re feeling
stuck.
Also makes the list of file formats a list, because it’s a list.
