The CSV upload route has always quietly ignored excess personalisation.
We changed the API to do the same here:
https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/853
This means that removing a placeholder from a template is never a
breaking change, because the data that you were providing to populate it
is now just ignored.
So we don’t need to show the interstitial page in this case.
Right now showing all the pages in full is the only way we have of
showing a letter that makes sense to our users. Maybe in the future we
show some kind of truncated version, but the end of the first page is
not a good place to truncate the letter.
This commit just extracts the code for showing multiple pages from the
template view, refactors it for reuse, and includes it in the send
views.
‘Print a test letter’ seems to be closer to what people’s expectations
of what this feature does are.
The word ‘generate’ sounded too much like something the system was
doing, rather than something you, the user, were doing.
Having to scroll past the template preview is fine for a short text
message, but annoying and confusing for a long letter. We even have
people completely missing what the page is for, because they don’t go
all the way to the bottom.
This change makes more sense now that we have a page for previewing a
template (not one long page with all the templates). You’re already
pretty confident that you’re using the right template on this page. It’s
just there as a double-check, and to help people understand where the
columns in the example file are coming from.
It doesn’t need to be a bullet point for each format. We tested this in
research with DWP staff yesterday and it didn’t cause any problems. I
also think it’s nicer for the UI to tell you what you need to do, rather
than tell you what it can “accept”.
This is a term that one of our research participants used to describe
the big bold text that starts each letter. I think it’s quite a nice
plain english term for it.
Also changes the formatting guidance to use the word heading instead of
title, for consistency.
It makes the error message quite noisy.
We’re going to move the table right underneath the error message, so
you’ll be able to see the column names right there.
Send yourself a test is:
- a good way of explaining how placeholders work
- a useful tool for checking your work before you send a big batch
It’s not a good way of learning about the relationship between columns
in a spreadsheet and placeholders. The ‘example spreadsheet’ thing is
good at making that connection. The table on this page isn’t, because
it doesn’t _feel_ like you’re making a spreadsheet with the send
yourself a test feature (even though that’s what you’re doing in the
background). This will be even more the case when we stop putting the
input boxes horizontally on one page.
By removing the table from this page it makes the page simpler, which
allows people to focus on the important thing – what’s happening to
their message.
before each request, we put the current service on the flask session,
except for with the static folder, cos it's not needed.... except, if
we 404, then we return the 404 template, which checks if you're logged
in or not to display different nav bar items. This was crashing when
current_service wasn't set, so we now set it.
also cleaned up some imports and stuff in test files
Because the email addresses can get pretty long, and have no spaces in
them, they sometimes break out of their containing box. This looks messy
and causes horizontal scrolling.
Users might be interested in letters. And when they’re fully
available, users will probably be able to control whether letters are
on/off for their service.
Until that point, the only way of getting the feature is to ask us. So
let’s make an in-the-meantime page that directs them to ask us, from the
place where they’d be able to do it themselves.
Wording TBC.
