At the moment they will get a ‘technical difficulties’ error if they
try.
We probably want to do something around letting people self-approve
broadcasts in trial mode, but for now just telling them they can’t is a
better experience than ‘technical difficulties’ (and will probably be
close to what they should see on a live service as well).
Different emergencies will need broadcasts to last for a variable amount
of time. We give users some control over this by letting them stop a
broadcast early. But we should also let them set a maximum broadcast
time, for:
- when the duration of the danger is known
- when the broadcast has been live long enough to alert everyone who
needs to know about it
This code re-uses the pattern for scheduling jobs, which has some
constraints that are probably OK for now:
- end time is limited to an hour
- longest duration is 3 whole days (eg if you start broadcasting Friday
you have the choice of Saturday, Sunday and all of Monday, up to
midnight)
If a broadcast definitely shouldn’t go out (for example because it has a
spelling mistake or is going to the wrong areas) then we should have a
way of removing it. Once it’s removed no-one else can approve it, and it
isn’t cluttering up the dashboard.
This is a link (because it’s a secondary action) and red (because it’s
destructive, in that it’s throwing away someone’s work).
Since new broadcasts will go into `pending-approval`, we now need a way
of approving them.
This commit adds a button to this page to start (or approve) the
broadcast. This button is wrapped in a bordered box, to emphasise that
it’s something consequential.
We don’t want one person going full yolo and start broadcasting without
any oversight. This commit changes the flow so that the button on the
‘preview’ page puts the broadcast into `pending-approval`, rather than
directly into `broadcasting`.
There was a lot of duplicate code here for updating the status and other
properties of a broadcast.
This commit abstracts them into reusable methods. They’re named with an
underscore to suggest that they shouldn’t be used externally.
This commit adds a page to view a single broadcast. This is important
for two reasons:
- users need an audit of what happened when, and who else was involved
in approving or cancelling a broadcast
- we need a place to put actions (approving, cancelling) on a broadcast
so that you can confirm details of the message and the areas before
performing the action
Shows the broadcasts with the longest time still to live at the top. At
the moment this will be the same as the newest broadcasts, so we may
want to revisit this sort order when we have broadcasts of variable
duration.
For no-longer-live broadcasts we show the most-recently-finished at the
top, whether it finished naturally or was cancelled.
Currently this is a `get` request from the dashboard. Once we have a page
for viewing an individual broadcast it should probably show there
instead and be a `get`/confirm/`post` loop like for deleting a template.
Shows current and previous broadcasts. Does not add a page for viewing
an individual broadcast.
Broadcasts are split into live and previous.
Draft broadcasts are excluded from the dashboard.
This commit removes the code the puts areas into the session and instead
creates and then updates a draft broadcast in the database.
This is so we can avoid session-related bugs, and potentially having a
large session when we start adding personalisation etc.
Once a broadcast is ready to go it is set to `broadcasting` straight
away with no approval. We’ll revisit this as we learn more about how
users might want to manage who can create and approve broadcasts.
The tests are a bit light in terms of checking what’s on the page, but
clicking through the pages is probably good enough for now.
