The search form makes a post request, so that phone numbers and email
addresses don’t show up in logs or browser history.
At most the API will return 50 results, with some pagination links. We
can’t easily give you links to click in the admin app, because links can
only perform get requests.
Because the value of seeing more than 50 results feels quite low (users
will probably make their search more specific before scrolling through
all 50) let’s just show a message saying only the first 50 results are
displayed.
Some email clients will pre-fetch links in emails to check whether
they’re safe. This has the unfortunate side effect of claiming the token
that’s in the link.
Long term, we don’t want to let the link be used multiple times, because
this reduces how secure it is (eg someone with access to your browser
history could re-use the link even if you’d signed out).
Instead, this commit adds an extra page which is served when the user
clicks the link from the email. This page includes a form which submits
to the actual URL that uses the token, thereby not claiming the token as
soon as the page is loaded.
For convenience, this page also includes some Javascript which clicks
the link on the user’s behalf. If the user has Javascript turned off
they will see the link and can click it themselves. This is going on the
assumption that whatever the email clients are doing when prefetching
the link doesn’t involve running any Javascript.
This Javascript is inlined so that:
- it is run as fast as possible
- it’s more resilient – even if our assets domain is unreachable or the
connection is interrupted, it will still run
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.
Context:
- postal addresses can be made from any of the 7 address lines now, and
the postcode can be in any one of the 7
- we can put errors across a whole row now, not just on individual cells
This commit put errors to do with the postal address as a whole across
the whole row now, rather than tying them to any one cell.
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.
Like we have search by email address or phone number, finding an
individual letter is a common task. At the moment users are having to
click through pages and pages of letters to find the one they’re looking
for.
Users of the API will also be able to search by reference, same as for
emails and text messages. But we only show this hint text to users who
have some API keys.
This commit does two things:
- brings the ‘All organisations’ page back within the platform admin
part of the site (because it’s hard to find otherwise)
- makes the layouts of all the pages within platform admin a bit closer
to the service-specific pages in terms of heading sizes, spacing, etc
so that moving between them doesn’t feel so jumpy
Errors with messages being too long or empty aren’t specific to a single
cell of the uploaded spreadsheet, they’re the results of combining all
the cells with the template.
Previously we could only show errors against a specific cell. This
commit makes it possible to add a super-row which spans all the cells,
into which we can put errors.
The index (header) column then spans both these rows, to show that they
are both associated with the same row of input.
Depends on:
- [x] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/719
A list table takes a list of input, and assumes one row of output. In
order to show errors that span multiple rows we need to output two rows
for one item of input.
The list table inherits from the mapping table; using the mapping table
directly gives us the flexibility we need.
Optional address placeholders aren’t a thing for one-off letters any
more, so we can tidy up the code a bit by removing the parts of the flow
that are accounting for them.
By default our AJAX calls were 2 seconds. Then they were 5 seconds
because someone reckoned 2 seconds was putting too much load on the
system. Then we made them 10 seconds while we were having an incident.
Then we made them 20 seconds for the heaviest pages, but back to 5
seconds or 2 seconds for the rest of the pages.
This is not a good situation because:
- it slows all services down equally, no matter how much traffic they
have, or which features they have switched on
- it slows everything down by the same amount, no matter how much load
the platform is under
- the values are set based on our worst performance, until we manually
remember to switch them back
- we spend time during incidents deploying changes to slow down the
dashboard refresh time because it’s a nothing-to-lose change that
might relieve some symptoms, when we could be spending time digging
into the underlying cause
This pull request makes the Javascript smarter about how long it waits
until it makes another AJAX call. It bases the delay on how long the
server takes to respond (as a proxy for how much load the server is
under).
It’s based on the square root of the response time, so is more sensitive
to slow downs early on, and less sensitive to slow downs later on. This
helps us give a more pronounced difference in delay between an AJAX call
that is fast (for example the page for a single notification) and one
that is slow (for example a dashboard for a service with lots of
traffic).
*Some examples of what this would mean for various pages*
Page | Response time | Wait until next AJAX call
---|---|---
Check a reply to address | 130ms | 1,850ms
Brand new service dashboard | 229ms | 2,783ms
HM Passport Office dashboard | 634ms | 5,294ms
NHS Coronavirus Service dashboard | 779ms | 5,977ms
_Example of the kind of slowness we’ve seen during an incident_ | 6,000ms | 18,364ms
GOV.UK email dashboard | `HTTP 504` | 😬
We’re caching the organisation name, but still talking to the API
to see if the organisation exists.
`Service().organisation_id` only goes to the JSON for the service.
`Service().organisation` makes a separate API call.
We only need the former to know if a service belongs to an organisation.
A lot of pages in the admin app are now generated entirely from Redis,
without touching the API.
The one remaining API call that a lot of pages make, when the user is
platform admin or a member of an organisation, is to get the name of
the current service’s organisation.
This commit adds some code to start caching that as well, which should
speed up page load times for when we’re clicking around the admin app
(it’s typically 100ms just to get the organisation, and more than that
when the API is under load).
This means changing the service model to get the organisation from the
API by ID, not by service ID. Otherwise it would be very hard to clear
the cache if the name of the organisation ever changed.
We can’t cache the whole organisation because it has a
`count_of_live_services` field which can change at any time, without an
update being made.
rather than in multiple placeholders - this is the first step towards
making postcodes non-required, which is the first step towards
international letters.
they still populate address_line_# and postcode fields under the hood -
to keep validation working the same, the last line always goes into
`postcode`.
the form normalises whitespace, removes extra new lines, and enforces
that you have between three and seven lines.
if the letter repeats address placeholders further down (eg "Dear
((address_line_1))"), then it'll fill those in as well. It'll still
prompt you to fill them in, but they'll be pre-filled.
Adds emergency services to cover more than just fire and police (eg
coastguard).
Adds armed forces and GP practices for people who might not be sure that
they’re covered under MOD and the NHS respectively.
If someone enters an email address from a domain we don’t recognise we
direct them straight to our support channel. This is causing increased
contact from suppliers and members of the public.
Now that we have a page which explains who can use Notify, let’s direct
people there first. Then if they really do need to contact support
(because we don’t recognise their organisation) then they can do so from
that page.
We have a policy about how suppliers are allowed to use Notify. But we
don’t explain it anywhere. Which drives contact to our support form.
This commit that adds a new page that explains the policy.
I’ve moved the related content about who else can use Notify from the
get started page to this page as well, where it doesn’t need to sit in
a details element.
This is for tickets coming from non-logged-in users. It’s effectively
the same as reporting a problem, but doesn’t have the banner about
the status page (because we can’t tell if they’re actually reporting a
problem now we’re not asking).
It also gives a more generic page title.
We can’t give advice to members of the public, but increasingly we’re
seeing them try to use our support form to ask.
It would be better for them if we can direct them straight to somewhere
more useful, before they have the chance to raise a support ticket.
This commit replaces the report a problem/ask a question triaging for
users who aren’t signed in. It’s not possible for non-signed-in users to
raise an priority 1 ticket, so we never need to triage the tickets in
this way.
Instead we can triage people based on whether they work in the public
sector or not. If they do then we send them on to the feedback form. If
not then they go to a new page which contains some useful links. We’ve
chosen these links based on some analysis of the support tickets we’ve
received recently[1]
1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uBQn-ZnCYfz6ltFaUKZpytgvBF0-MeshCLZ1cD74R0c/edit?usp=sharing
We are seeing little benefit of allowing users to not put in their email
address. This will mean that you must provide it for feedback, not just
problems with the site.
There could maybe be some more refactoring of the support templates as
this is now very similar to the report a problem page but this is a
quick fix so haven't gone too in depth.
Dashboard is the most intensive page we AJAX, and also the highest
traffic one. We’ve already slowed it from 2 to 5 seconds, this slows it
further to 20 seconds to reduce the load.
This leaves other pages (for example looking at a single job) at the
platform-level default of 5 seconds, because we think they cause less
load and the real-timelyness isn’t critical to people’s business
processes.
For looking at a single notification we know from research that someone
sending these one-at-a-time often waits to see if they’re delivered,
so let’s bring this back down to the previous value of 2 seconds.
This page is slow to load which means:
- it’s annoying for us
- it’s potentially causing load on the database
This commit does two things to reduce the amount we’re unnecessarily
looking at this page:
1. Avoid redirecting to it when signing in as a platform admin user
2. Don’t go directly to it when clicking ‘platform admin’ at the top,
but instead show a holding page (there’s a fair chance you’ve clicked
that link in order to go and manage some email branding or find a
user, not wait for stats to load)
