Umlaut's Feedback Form

From Umlaut 3.3 on

Some Umlaut installations may use SFX's built-in feedback form, passing the links to such through Umlaut.

But you may not be using SFX, or you may find SFX's feedback form not to your liking.

Umlaut has very basic, somewhat experimental built-in feedback form functionality. It can be used to display one or more feedback/help links on your resolver menu, which provide a form in which the user can enter comments/questions, and have them emailed to library staff. The email will automatically include some context information about what page the user was looking at.

This is somewhat new functionality, developed largely for jrochkind's local use cases. Feedback welcome!

Here's how you turn it on in Umlaut:

Turn off SFX feedback form

For efficiency, you probably want to disable the feedback targets in SFX, since we won't be using them anymore.

Enable Umlaut's Feedback form

1. Configure email addresses that will receive feedback

In your local app/controllers/umlaut_controller.rb, inside the umlaut_config.configure do block, add one or more feedback email addresses. Each needs a unique id for internal use:

     feedback do |conf|
        conf.contacts = {
          :main_library    => {:email_address => "librarians@university.edu", :label => "Main Library"},
          :science_library => {:email_address => "scilib@somewhere.edu", :label => "Science Library"}
        }
      end

Instead of an :email_address, you can also use :link_to => "http://some.tld/somewhere", to simply add a link to the screen to some external website.

You also should set the default umlaut email 'from' address, if you haven't already. Still in the umlaut_config.configure do block:

    # You can use a no-reply, but better to use a real email address
    # if you have one. Email sent by umlaut will be from this address. 
    from_email_addr 'no_reply@university.edu'

2. Tell Umlaut to display feedback links using this built-in feature

Still in your UmlautController's umlaut_config.configure block:

Yeah, a little bit hacky for now, sorry.

      # Use Umlaut's built-in feedback instead of SFX's
      # First remove the current default 'help' view section
      resolve_sections.delete_if {|section| section[:div_id] == "help"}
      # Then add in the one for Umlaut's internal feedback
      resolve_sections.unshift(Confstruct::Configuration.new do 
        div_id "help"
        service_type_values []
        partial "feedback/resolve_section"
        section_title "Question? Problem? Contact:"
        html_area :sidebar
        bg_update false        
        show_heading false
        show_spinner false
      end)