“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
— Henry Ford
Last time, I cleaned up all of the loose odds and ends of the display portion of the Generic Feedback Widget, which should have wrapped up that portion of the project. I say “should have” because now that I have it all working I see that there are a couple more things that I would like to do. For one, I think that there should be a limit on the number of entries initially displayed with an option to show them all. Once you accumulate a certain amount of feedback, no one is really going to want to go through all of that, so I think the initial limit should be something like 5 or 10 entries, with the rest only appearing if requested.
Another thing that I noticed in looking at some existing sample data is that the live_message text can contain hashtags, and there should be some code included that formats those hashtags. Of course, that would mean that there would have to be some place to go if you clicked on a hashtag, which sounds like an entirely different project. I’m not really up for that just yet, so I decided to push all of those thoughts aside and get back to the main purpose of this little widget, which is to collect new feedback.
Since the live_message table that I am using to store this feedback supports @mentions, I decided to use the snh-form-field tag that supports @mentions as the input element. This makes the HTML for the form field pretty simple.
<form ng-show="data.showComment" id="form1" name="form1" novalidate>
<snh-form-field snh-model="c.data.comment" snh-name="comment" snh-type="mention" snh-label="Leave a comment:"/>
<button class="btn btn-primary" ng-click="postComment();">Post Comment</button>
</form>
In order to use the snh-form-field tags, you also need to add the snhFormField Angular Provider down at the bottom of the widget, but that’s just a matter of selecting that tab and clicking on the Edit button.
One other thing that you need to do with the @mentions is to expand those to include the sys_id before writing them to the database. Here again we will have the sys_user sys_id in the mentionMap, but what we really need for the live_message text is the live_profile sys_id. For that, we will go back to our earlier functions to translate one to the other.
function expandMentions(entryText, mentionIDMap) {
return entryText.replace(/@\[(.+?)\]/gi, function (mention) {
var response = mention;
var mentionedName = mention.substring(2, mention.length - 1);
if (mentionIDMap[mentionedName]) {
var liveProfileId = getProfileSysId(mentionIDMap[mentionedName]);
if (liveProfileId) {
response = "@[" + liveProfileId + ":" + mentionedName + "]";
}
}
return response;
});
}
To save the feedback, we need the conversation, the author, and the expanded message. The conversation is the live_group_profile record that points to the table and sys_id to which this feedback is attached. If there were any existing comments, then this record already exists. If not, then we will have to create it using the table and sys_id. The author is the currently authenticated user, but again, we have that person’s sys_user sys_id, when what we really need is the live_profile sys_id. For that we will have to go back to our sys_id translators once again. All together, the code ended up looking like this:
function postComment(comment) {
if (!data.convId) {
var conv = new GlideRecord('live_group_profile');
conv.initialize();
conv.table = data.table;
conv.document = data.sys_id;
conv.insert();
data.convId = conv.getValue('sys_id');
}
comment = comment.trim();
comment = expandMentions(comment, data.mentionMap['comment']);
var liveProfileId = getProfileSysId(gs.getUserID());
var fb = new GlideRecord('live_message');
fb.initialize();
fb.group = data.convId;
fb.profile = liveProfileId;
fb.message = comment;
fb.insert();
}
You can also mark the message public or private, and I have thought about providing an option at the widget level to let you configure instances one way or another, but for this initial version, we will just take the default. At this point, all that is left is to take it out for a spin …
Clicking on the Post Comment button saves the feedback and then reloads the page.
I like it! Now, this little sample page only contains the Dynamic Breadcrumbs Widget and the new Generic Feedback Widget, but in the real world this new feedback widget would just be a secondary widget on a page with the main attraction displayed in a primary widget. This widget could be placed underneath or in a sidebar, but it really isn’t intended to be the main focus of a page. But then again, how you want to use it is clearly up to you. There are still a few things that I would like to do before I consider this one all finished up, but there is enough here now to release an Update Set for any of you who are interested in playing along at home. The next one will be better, but this version does work.
