2019-07-18 - Progress - Tony Finch
This week I am back porting ops pages from v2 to v3.
I'm super keen to hear any complaints you have about the existing user interface. Please let ip-register@uis.cam.ac.uk know of anything you find confusing or awkward! Not everything will be addressed in this round of changes but we'll keep them in mind for future work.
API cookies
Jackdaw has separate pages to download an API cookie and manage API cookies. The latter is modal and switches between an overview list and a per-cookie page.
In v3 they have been commbined into a single page (screenshot below) with less modality, and I have moved the verbiage to a separate API cookie documentation page.
While I was making this work I got terribly confused that my v3 cookie page did not see the same list of cookies as Jackdaw's manage-cookies page, until I realised that I should have been looking at the dev database on Ruff. The silliest bugs take the longest to fix...
Single ops
Today I have started mocking up a v3 "single ops" page. This is a bit of a challenge, because the existing page is rather cluttered and confusing, and it's hard to improve within the constraint that I'm not changing its functionality.
I have re-ordered the page to be a closer match to the v3 box ops
page. The main difference is that the
address field is near the top because it is frequently used as a
primary search key.
There is a downside to this placement, because it separates the address from the other address-related fields which are now at the bottom: the address's mzone, lan, subnet, and the mac and dhcp group that are properties of the address rather than properties of the box.
On the other hand, I wanted to put the address-related fields near the
register and search buttons to hint that they are kind of related:
you can use the address-related fields to get the database to
automatically pick an address for registration following those
constraints, or you can search for boxes within the constraints.
Did you know that (like table ops but unlike most other pages) you can use SQL-style wildcards to search on the single ops page?
Finally, a number of people said that the mzone / lan boxes are super awkward, and they explicitly asked for a drop-down list. This breaks the rule against no new functionality, but I think it will be simple enough that I can get away with it. (Privileged users still get the boxes rather than a drop-down with thousands of entries!)
