The breaking change page wasn’t properly accounting for the fact that
letter recipients span multiple columns – it was assuming they’d only
take up one column like they do for email and SMS.
This commit fixes:
- the number of column headers (A, B, C, …) to be correct
- the count of columns (you will need X columns in your file) to be
correct
It then parameterises the test to look at a case where a recipient is
in one column (email) and multiple columns (letter).
pass in the base URL - if not set in the environment this is set to
localhost, but on paas we can pull this out of vcap_services so that
letters render properly on paas
When adding a letter it’s hard to know how the stuff you’re typing is
going to look. So rather than go straight to the edit form let’s show
users a blank letter. They can then choose which part of it they want
to edit first. And will have a better idea of how their changes are
going to show up.
In research we also saw nervousness around saving a template and wanting
to ‘preview’ it first. Hopefully this flow will make people feel less
precious about saving a template because they’ve already done it once
just by creating the template.
When you add a new template the next thing you want to do is probably:
- send a test
- edit it after seeing what it looks like
So let’s redirect you straight to the page where you can do these
things.
This is especially important for letters where we want to tighten the
edit/feedback loop.
Because we have space there’s no need to hide this now. Makes it less
confusing to have parts of the email appear/disappear as you’re clicking
through the flow.
Not everyone knows how to use `ctrl` + `f`, and it’s not scoped to
just the list of templates.
The template you want to work with is often not the first one in the
list, but ordering by created at is useful for other reasons (mainly
around first time use).
This commit adds a find as you type control which aims to give users a
quick way of getting to the template they want to work with.
When a team has lots of templates the choose template page gets very
long. It gets hard to find the template that you are looking for.
Our initial reckon was that teams would not be giving their templates
very useful names, and therefore a preview would be helpful. What we
have found is that:
- teams actually do give their templates useful names, and refer to
these template names elsewhere
- the previews are less useful for emails and text messages, because
they have so much content (which for emails also makes it harder to
`ctrl` + `f` the template name)
The other problem we found was that this page presented the user with
a _lot_ of options. For each template there were 4 actions, plus the
click-to-preview action for letters, plus the ‘see previous version’
action for templates that had been edited multiple times. It was a very
busy page.
And the final problem (that we recently introduced) was that there was
no way, other than the visual cues, to know whether a template was a
letter, email, or text message.
So this commit strips back the choose template page to be very focused
on finding the right template, by only showing the template name and
type. The user can then click through to a page that shows just a single
template, and perform actions relevant to that template from that page.
The breaking change page temporarily holds the changes in hidden inputs
on the page. The messages content it gets from the `.content` property
on the subject. This is raw and not transformed in any way, so fine.
For the subject it gets the value from the `.subject` attribute on the
template. For email templates, this will be transformed to highlight
placeholders with `<span class='placeholder'>…`. This means that when
the change is confirmed, it’s this encoded version that gets sent to the
API. Which is bad, because we then save `<span class='placeholder'>` in
the database.
This commit changes the page to look at the `._subject` attribute
instead, which is the internal, untransformed version of the subject.
For some reason we were rebuilding `new_template` as a dictionary,
without the `placeholders` attribute. This meant that we were never
actually counting the placeholders, just counting the length of `None`
and adding 1 to it.
So this commit fixes that, beefs up the tests, and makes sure that
everything is pluralised properly.
Right now we have separate pages for email and text message templates.
In the future we will also have a separate page for letter templates.
This commit changes Notify to only have one page for all templates.
What is the problem?
---
The left-hand navigation is getting quite crowded, at 8 items for a
service that can send letters. Research suggests that the number of
objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2 [1]. So
we’re at the limit of how many items the navigation should have.
In the future we will need to search/sort/filter templates by attributes
other than type, for example:
- show me the ‘confirmation’ templates
- show me the most recently used templates
- show me all templates containing the placeholder `((ref_no))`
These are hypothetical for now, but these needs (or others) may become
real in the future. At this point pre-filtering the list of templates
by type would restrict what searches a user could do. So by making this
change now we’re in a better position to iterate the design in the
future.
What’s the change?
---
This commit replaces the ‘Email templates’, ‘Text message templates’ and
‘Letter templates’ pages with one page called ‘Templates’.
This new templates page shows all the templates for the service, sorted
by most recently created first (as before).
To add a new template there is a new page with a form asking you what
kind of template you want to create. This is necessary because in the
past we knew what kind of template you wanted to create based on the
kind you were looking at.
What’s the impact of this change on new users?
---
This change alters the onboarding process slightly. We still want to
take people through the empty templates page from the call-to-action on
the dashboard because it helps them understand that to send a message
using Notify you need a template. But because we don’t have separate
pages for emails/text messages we will have to send users through the
extra step of choosing what kind of template to create. This is a bit
clunkier on first use but:
- it still gets the point across
- it takes them through the actual flow they will be using to create new
templates in the future (ie they’re learning how to use Notify, not
just being taken through a special onboarding route)
I’m not too worried about this change in terms of the experience for new
users. Furthermore, by making it now we get to validate whether it’s
causing any problems in the lab research booked for next week.
What’s the impact of this change on current services?
---
Looking at the top 15 services by number of templates[2], most are using
either text messages or emails. So this change would not have a
significant impact on these services because the page will not get any
longer. In other words we wouldn’t be making it worse for them.
Those services who do use both are not using as many templates. The
worst-case scenario is SSCS, who have 16 templates, evenly split between
email and text messages. So they would go from having 8 templates per
page to 16, which is still less than half the number that HMPO or
Digital Marketplace are managing.
References
---
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
2. Template usage by service
Service name | Template count | Template types
---------------------------------------|----------------|---------------
Her Majesty's Passport Office | 40 | sms
Digital Marketplace | 40 | email
GovWifi-Staging | 19 | sms
GovWifi | 18 | sms
Digital Apprenticeship Service | 16 | email
SSCS | 16 | both
Crown Commercial Service MI Collection | 15 | email
Help with Prison Visits | 12 | both
Digital Future | 12 | email
Export Licensing Service | 11 | email
Civil Money Claims | 9 | both
DVLA Drivers Medical Service | 9 | sms
GOV.UK Notify | 8 | both
Manage your benefit overpayments | 8 | both
Tax Renewals | 8 | both
The url was not being properly formed, missing the tempalte_id, meaning the back button on the page did not work.
This fixes that, includes a check of the url for the back button.
There is a check that the template can not be created as priority if the user is not a platform admin.
There is a check that the template can not change the `priority` unless they are a platform admin.
Right now we can show what a letter template looks like as a PDF or PNG.
This commit completes the work so this is also possible when:
- showing a template with the placeholders replaced
- showing any version of a template
Also removes dependency on `Exception().message`, which was deprecated
in Python 2.6. See
97f82d565f
for full details.
The breaking change page was taking the rendered template and saving
that if the user confirmed the change. This meant that templates could
be saved with `<span class="placeholder">…</span>` in their subject line
for example.
This commit fixes it so that it uses whatever data the user submitted,
not the rendered version of this.
The PDF preview is all good, but it’s hard, finickeity and feels dirty
to embed a PDF in a web page. It’s a more natural thing to embed an
image in a web page.
So this commit adds another endpoint to return an image of a letter
template. It generates this image from the PDF preview, so the stack
looks like:
1. `template.png` (generated in admin)
2. `template.pdf` (generated in admin)
3. HTML preview (generated by a `Renderer` in utils)
4. `Template` instance
5. serialised template from API
6. Template stored in database
The library used to convert the PDF to an image is Wand[1], which binds
to ImageMagick underneath. So in order to get this working locally on a
Mac you will probably need to do:
`brew install imagemagick ghostscript cairo pango`.
To get it working on Ubuntu/EC2 is an exercise left to the reader…
1. http://docs.wand-py.org/en/0.4.4/
Previewing a letter is different to previewing an email or text message
because:
- a letter has a layout
- the layout is fixed, ie it doesn’t depend on the user’s device
- the ‘send yourself a test’ feature won’t be as useful because it has
a lead time, so the feedback loop will be much longer
For these reasons a HTML-only preview of the letter won’t be enough (we
don’t think). A PDF is more appropriate because:
- it can replicate the layout of the letter exactly
- it is a print format, so the user could even print themselves a copy
locally to get a feel for how it will look
This commit makes use of Flask WeasyPrint [1] to take a HTML
representation of the letter, convert it to a PDF and serve it back to
the user.
The actual work to generate the HTML and specify the layout is done in
utils, same as we do for rendering other messages.
1. https://pythonhosted.org/Flask-WeasyPrint/
Implements https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/81
Handles addresses as multiple columns:
- in ‘Send yourself a test’
- in example CSV files
- in validating that a CSV file has recipients (eg at least an ‘address
line 1’ and ‘postcode’ column)
- when showing the contents of a CSV file
As few UI changes as possible, once we have the thing working end-to-end
we can think about how the UI might need to work differently.
Let users create/edit/delete letter templates.
Let them upload a CSV file or send a test against a letter template.
Big assumption at the moment is that addresses only have one line, and
therefore one column in the CSV file.
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.
Now that the example on the breaking changes page looks more like a spreadsheet,
we should do the same thing for the downloadable example on the send page.
When a user adds or removes placeholders in their template we should consider
this a ‘breaking change’ and warn them accordingly.
Implementing this mostly relies on using
https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/37
Temporarily storing the new template until the user confirms that they want to
make the changes in done using hidden fields. This is a bit hacky, but the
complexity of making sessions interact with WTForms was just too much to handle.
This commit also changes the example spreadsheet that we show on this page to
look more like a spreadsheet.
> At the moment, we have an all email templates page, and an edit an
> individual page.
>
> This gets messy when we refer to templates like the dashboard and the
> activity views. We solve this currently by using anchor links to the
> list page, but this is clunky.
>
> So lets add it, then update the links on the dash and activity to the
> new view page.
>
> Should be a link from the view a single template page, to the template
> hub page.
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/117349227
Each service on the list is linked to the dashboard page of the service.
The platform admin user can see/edit templates, see/invite users, see/edit service settings.
The platform admin user can not send messages, see/edit api keys and developer docs.
The same `.html` file is shared between adding a template and editing a
template.
The page heading needs to be contextual to the URL, either ‘add’ or ‘edit’.
Somewhere along the way this got lost; this commit reinstates it.
