job composer form builder

[johrstrom]

From discourse: https://discourse.osc.edu/t/batch-applications/133

So this feature reads like this: The job composer's jobs should have some way to allow users to build a form (like WYSIWYG editor) and to submit the job with those form parameters.

Honestly I think a big leap forward would be to provide a similar experiece to the batch connect apps. Users could add a form.yml.erb to their jobs template directory and we could render that form. As we build the feature we could add the ability the write the file from some form builder UI, but I think a solid MVP would be to render the form and submit the job with it's context if it exists.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Asana task by Unito

[ndusek]

I would be willing to give this a try, but I would need somebody to point me in the right direction on where to begin.

[johrstrom]

Hi! Yea we're merging all the apps into the dashboard, sans job composer. My guess (total guess, I don't think we've sorted out what our plan is yet) is that we'll have all this functionality semi-hidden in the dashboard until we happy with the way it looks then remove the old and enable the new.

So that's what I would do. Make brand new files in the dashboard that are either copies of the job composer files or are heavily inspired from them. Within the dashboard, I suspect the job composer and batch connect app forms will have some relationship (or are the same). I mean - that's sort of the desired functionality, writing a small reusable form in the job composer.

That said, I don't think this is an easy ticket. I would copy files into the dashboard and try to piece together how those views can also use forms similar to batch connect apps (which may need some re-factoring or abstracting to accommodate these two very similar use cases) and see how far you get.

I'd be happy to look at your fork while you work! There's no harm in creating a draft pull request that we can comment on.

[ndusek]

Nice to see continued discussion and activity on this feature. Is this, by chance, included in the "job management" task on the roadmap, slated for 3.0?

[johrstrom]

Yes, though we don't really use that roadmap board anymore.

[johrstrom]

I'm going to close this because the alpha release of the Project Manager does this in the scripts#edit view. It encapsulates this idea and indeed will never have a user edit a form.yml to submit a job - it's all done through the UI. So while this ticket is not exactly complete, the work has been started and we have a solid foundation. The ticket itself is far to large to keep around forever anyhow - it's more of an idea spread across many many tickets, which by this time have been implemented to some degree.

[johrstrom]

@ndusek if you're still interested in contributing you can see the ticket for the Project Manager at #3394. An alpha version was released in 3.1 and disabled by default (and undocumented), but it's there with some basic functionality.

[ndusek]

@johrstrom, thanks for the update. Do you have any documentation or discussion on the Project Manager besides the todo list in #3394? I didn't see anything about it in the 3.1 release notes. Curious to know what sort of strategy you decided on for the new job composer.