Desired: From Discussion back to Queue instead of Your Workspace

[bobahop]

It would be nice if, after closing a discussion, one is back to the Queue instead of Your Workspace.

The flow now goes from Queue to Discussion to Your Workspace to Queue to scroll down to the exercise I was mentoring to click the exercise to scroll back up to pick a solution.

It would be much nicer if the flow was from Queue to Discussion to Queue back where I was with the solutions reduced by the one I just mentored.

If it's not too much trouble.

The alternative is to bring up the discussion in a new tab, which is fine as long as I remember which solutions I already mentored so I don't pick one again. That's what I did on v2.

[iHiD]

@bobahop Would the nicest thing be if the whole mentoring UI was effectively a modal on whichever screen you were on? (So clicking the x actually just closes the modal). Nothing would look different, but I feel that it would make more sense. This was my plan which hasn't yet got done (just because it was more work). But if you agree that's a better solution, I might hold off changing this and just do that in the next couple of weeks instead? If it's really bugging you, it's trivial for me to change the button in the short term too though. Let me know 🙂

[bobahop]

It's not really bugging me. I'm just doing in v3 what I did in v2 (opening a new tab.) Opening a new tab means I work from an old copy of the list as I mentor a bunch of solutions for the same exercise, which isn't a problem unless someone starts working the same exercise.

But yes, after higher priorities are done, I think for it to be modal would be better. The tricky thing there might be refreshing the "parent" page on modal close. I can wait for it.

[joshgoebel]

This is also biting me, but I'm also ok to wait for it to be fixed properly if that's the greater good.

[angelikatyborska]

Would the nicest thing be if the whole mentoring UI was effectively a modal on whichever screen you were on?

Do I understand correctly, the view with two panels, student's code and the comments to be all in a modal? Depends on the implementation, but that sounds like a bad idea to me.

• Would it still be full screen on desktop (most modal aren't)? If not, then that takes away valuable space.
• Would it still have its own URL? Can I copy it and get exactly the same view in another browser, with the mentoring UI opened? If no, that's a downgrade.

[joshgoebel]

We're not talking about any UI change, just where the "X" (close) button takes you... it should go BACK - not always take you to Inbox... the URLs shouldn't be affected at all if done properly.

[bobahop]

You probably already know this (I haven't kept up with web stuff), but one thing about modal I just remembered today is the issues I had a few years back because browsers were phasing true modal windows out (especially due to ad blockers, I think), so the implementation changed. I was using DevExpress, so it handled that.

showModalDialog is now deprecated in favor of the dialog element, I believe, but I could be wrong about the current way to implement.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/showModalDialog
https://alligator.io/html/dialog-element/

[iHiD]

To clarify, from a UI perspective, nothing would change. We'd just render the mentoring component on top of the component behind. We already do this in quite a few places (e.g. the whole mentor registration flow, which you won't have been through).

But the difference is when you click the cross, it just closes the upper layer. Josh - it can't take you back, because often people open discussions in new tabs, so there is no concept of "back". So it needs to have some URL.

There are lots of different places to pick up a mentoring session from (especially from a student's perspective). The mentoring button appears on loads of different pages. So being able to open the session, reply, and then close the modal and continue from where you were feels nicer to me.

[iHiD]

@bobahop We've not used the dialog element yet - we use a react component to handle them all. I'll take a look into that more though once things have settled :)

[joshgoebel]

it can't take you back, because often people open discussions in new tabs, so there is no concept of "back". So it needs to have some URL.

When it knows where you came from (or which you accessed most recently in that tab) it could take you back, if there was no prior history at all it could return you to a default place. I thought that's what we're proposing here?

[Minification]

When it knows where you came from (or which you accessed most recently in that tab) it could take you back, if there was no prior history at all it could return you to a default place. I thought that's what we're proposing here?

That is exactly what I thought.

To be honest, even just emulating the browser back button would be enough for me.