It’s useful to be able to play with the CSV upload thing and find out
how it works before you’re interrupted by the error telling you that
you’ve got as far as you can in trial mode.
We don’t want users in trial mode sending real letters. So we’ve
introduced an error message. This error message is also showing up when
users in trial mode and making a test letter (and having the knock on
effect of hiding the download button).
They should be able to make a test letter in trial mode, because it
doesn’t cost anything.
Telling users that they can’t send to more than 50 recipients in trial
mode doesn’t apply for letters (they can’t send to _any_ recipients).
So we should make sure that the error message about not being able to
send to any recipients always comes up instead of the 50 recipients one,
whether you’re trying to upload a file with 1 or 111 rows.
Users in trial mode haven’t signed the MOU. This means that they haven’t
agreed to pay for any costs they incur.
Unlike text messages and emails, we don’t give you any free allowance of
letters. Sending _any_ letters will cost the user money.
Therefore we shouldn’t let users who haven’t agreed that they will pay
for the service to incur costs by sending letters.
The pattern used for this is roughly the same as other trial mode errors
that we have already, ie a red box that says you’re not allowed. Not
sure if this is exactly right because it’s not exactly an error so the
pattern might feel too heavy-handed.
Getting this in place means we can turn letters on for users in trial
mode without worrying that they’ll accidentally send real letters, which
would result in:
- us having to absorb those costs
- some awkward conversations
This was causing a 500 in production.
This commit:
- reverts the code the working state it was before 68a1426e58
- figures out a way to make the tests pass without breaking the actual
app
- confirms that mocking things is hard
There’s some weird interaction between the message attribute of the
exception and mocking.
Luckily there is an internal attribute – `_message` which doesn’t go
through all the magic.
If you have errors in your file then there’s stuff you’re not going to
see on the page. So this doesn’t need to be in the Jinja templates that
are only used when there are errors.
Basically the conditional stuff is moving up to the level above these
templates.
There’s no immediate feedback with letter jobs, unlike email or text
messages jobs where you see the numbers starting to tick over straight
away.
We need to reassure the user that the thing they asked us to do (send
letters) is underway. ‘Printing’ feels like the natural first state of
the letter-making process. So this commit adds a banner to tell the
user that printing is the thing that’s happening.
If sending SMS is disabled for a service, it should not be possible to
add or modify SMS templates. If a user tries to do this, they should see
a different page with a link to go back. The same thing should happen
with email templates.
The following errors may happen:
* Number outside of service if service in trial mode
* Message too long for sms
* Service over daily limit
We need to handle these. They only return on send, rather than in a
separate validation step (for now).
where we were previously setting the placeholder when going through
the send self a test - however, should be setting recipient. Also,
only do this on step-0 of the one-off route, not the send-test route,
since step-0 of send-test is the first normal placeholder. Phew!
note: in the case of letters, we still want to create a CSV file. This
only modifies the code flow when it's an email or template 😩
renamed `send_test_values` to `placeholders` because a) that's what
they are and b) this isn't just for sending a test message any more
rather than creating a job, after entering the placeholders, you now
send a single notification. This means we don't clog up s3 by creating
lots of one line CSV files.
it's confusing reassigining one template (json from api) to another
type (utils object) on one line.
Also removed an unnecessary bounds check (since if placeholders is
empty the IndexError will throw on the next line anyway and it'll
be handled the same), and moved get_back_link out to its own function
‘One-off’ is a bit wooly. Feels like our name for the thing. ‘Send to
one recipient’ matches ‘Upload recipients’.
This also means making the `<h1>` on job page ‘Report’ for one-off
messages. It doesn’t make sense to call the feature ‘send to one
recipient’ when we’re not using the language of one-off any more.
It’s a confusing proposition to have two features which are almost
identical. Even differentiating between them in the template menu would
be tricky.
I think the better thing to do is rename the whole feature to ‘send
one-off message’.
Then if someone wants to use there own phone number or email address,
give them a quick shortcut to doing that, once they’re in the flow.
In the background this reuses the ‘send yourself a test’ code, but
the user is never aware that they’re going through a different route
to send an individual message. So the proposition stays nice and clean.
We have some fairly complicated nested if statements in our Jinja that
decide what the page titles should be. It’s only going to get more
complicated with the send individual message routes.
So this commit:
- moves the logic from Jinja to Python
- adds tests to check things are working as expected
- sets the page titles to the right thing for each flow
It would be annoying to get all the way to the end of the flow and get
told that the phone number or email address you entered isn’t valid.
So this commit reuses the existing WTForms objects that we have to do
some extra validation on the first step in the send one-off message
flow. It also accounts for international phone numbers, if the service
is allowed to send them.
It doesn’t reject other people’s phone numbers if your service is
restricted, because I think it’s better to let users play with the
feature – it’s good for learning.
This commit adds an extra, initial, step to the ‘send one-off message’
flow to ask for a phone number or email address. This is the first pass
at making a feature which caseworkers or similar could use Notify to
send individual messages while they’re working a case.
This commit adds a route which is identical to send yourself a test, but
with its own endpoint. This will let us add a slightly different
‘send a one-off message’ flow. This commit just adds the route though,
and makes sure that the tests pass for both routes.
Because we put the step in the URL, users could:
- skip ahead to a later step
- navigate to a step which doesn’t exist (ie an index greater than the
number of placeholders)
This commit adds some checks to do the sensible thing in the unlikely
event that either of these situations occur.
Calculating the number of pages in a letter is quite slow. And the send
yourself a test pages need to load _fast_. Since filling in placeholders
is very unlikely to change the number of pages in the resultant letter,
it’s pretty safe to cache that count, and makes the subsequent pages
load a lot faster.
The send yourself a test feature is useful for two things:
- constructing an email/text message/letter without uploading a CSV file
- seeing what the thing your going to send will look like (either by
getting it in your inbox or downloading the PDF)
- learning the concept of placeholders, ie understanding they’re thing
that gets populated with _stuff_
The problem we’re seeing is that the current UI breaks when a template
has a lot of placeholders. This is especially apparent with letter
templates, which have a minimum of 7 placeholders by virtue of the
address.
The idea behind having the form fields side-by-side was to help people
understand the relationship between their spreadsheet columns and the
placeholders. But this means that the page was doing a lot of work,
trying to teach:
- replacement of placeholders
- link between placeholders and spreadsheet columns
The latter is better explained by the example spreadsheet shown on the
upload page. So it can safely be removed from the send yourself a test
page – in other words the fields don’t need to be shown side by side.
Showing them one-at-a-time works well because:
- it’s really obvious, even on first use, what the page is asking you to
do
- as your step through each placeholder, you see the message build up
with the data you’ve entered – you’re learning how replacement of
placeholders works by repetition
This also means adding a matching endpoint for viewing each step of
making the test letter as a PDF/PNG because we can’t reuse the view of
the template without any placeholders filled any more.
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.
If a service can send internationally, our CSV validation should not
catch valid international phone numbers. This means calling through
to code added to utils in:
- [ ] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/156
This has been removed from utils (so things will break if utils is
upgraded without this change isn’t made). I think it’s friendlier to
present the phone number as the user entered it anyway – because this is
what they think a ‘correct’ phone number representation looks like
anyway.
while PDFs work on paas, they only do that because it turns out the
python buildpack happens to have imagemagick preinstalled - if that
ever changes then it'd break. so move those to the template preview
service. This also means we can get rid of weazyprint and wand
dependencies
We’ve seen in letters usability testing that people get stuck in a
“no-man’s land” when trying to go back from the _Send yourself a test_
page.
This was broken for two reasons:
- we hadn’t considered that a letter template without placeholder still
requires you to fill in
- we’ve changed subsequently made the _view template_ page the place
where you do your actions, rather than the (old) page with all the
templates shown
So this commit fixes it so that the back link always take you back to
the page you were previously on, and adds some more test cases so we
have all the scenarios accounted for.
Address line 3 is optional. Currently the only way we have of indicating
to users what is/isn’t optional is by using the example. Which probably
isn’t ideal, but should at least be correct.
Not necessary to have it on its own page – it’s one line of stuff. And
definitely not as frequent use as the ‘Upload recipients’ or ‘Send
yourself a test’ links.
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
> When the CSV is missing the header row, we get an error and the user
> will see "Sorry, we are experiencing technical difficulties..."
>
> We should return a better error message for the user.
– https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/140668615
This was caused by an attempt to access the `first_recipient` variable
before it was assigned. It would only be assigned when there was at
least one row in the file.
Fixing this means doing two things:
- defaulting `first_recipient` to be `None` before looking in the file
- adding an error message for when we can’t extract any rows out of the
file (which is more nuanced than the file just being completely empty)
(There’s a nasty `sort` in the Jinja template because when there are no
rows in the file the order of the required column headers is not
deterministic.)
