🎸❤️‍🩹 Revise activity display logic to show author information when Fleet-initiated flag is set but author is not set to "Fleet"

[eugkuo]

Goal

User story
As an IT admin,
I want to see which user triggered a higher-level action that resulted in e.g. Fleet creating a policy
so that I can keep track of who is doing what and can reach out to them if I have questions.

Key result

Auto-update (patch) any software without writing custom policies

Original requests

#21825

Context

• Design: @eugkuo
• Dev: @iansltx

Changes

Product

• UI changes: Figma design

  Revise activity display logic to show author information when Fleet-initiated flag is set but author is not set to "Fleet". This will be used for auto-install/patch later.

• CLI (fleetctl) usage changes: No changes.

• YAML changes: No changes.

• REST API changes: No changes.

• Fleet's agent (fleetd) changes: No changes.

• GitOps mode changes: No changes.

• Activity changes: No activity format changes. This is a UI-only change for display of existing activities.

• Permissions changes: No changes.

• Changes to paid features or tiers: N/A

• My device and fleetdm.com/better changes: No changes

• First draft of test plan added

• Other reference documentation changes: No changes

• Once shipped, requester has been notified

• Once shipped, dogfooding issue has been filed

Engineering

• Test plan is finalized
• Contributor API changes: No changes
• Feature guide changes: No changes

ℹ️  Please read this issue carefully and understand it. Pay special attention to UI wireframes, especially "dev notes".

QA

Risk assessment

• Risk level: Low

Test plan

Make sure to go through the list and consider all events that might be related to this story, so we catch edge cases earlier.

Steps

1. From /software/add/ add a software installer (FMA, VPP or non-exe custom installer), and set it to be installed automatically, ensure the policy is created in /policies/manage (assuming No global activity item is shown when a policy is automatically created during software installer add #28259 is resolved first, otherwise, the policy will need to be added manually for a global activity item to show up)
2. Find the activity associated with the creation of the policy in the database and set the fleet_initiated value to true
3. On the Global activity feed, verify that the actor for the creation/edit/deletion of the policy is the currently logged in user, not "Fleet"

Testing notes

Confirmation

1. Engineer: Added comment to user story confirming successful completion of test plan.
2. QA: Added comment to user story confirming successful completion of test plan.

[eugkuo]

4 .On the Global activity feed, verify that the actor for the creation/edit/deletion of the policy is the currently logged in user, not "Fleet"

🔴 Changes made via GitOps/API - What shows for these?

I'm not entirely sure what happens now. @iansltx Do we know who the GitOps person is who makes changes to be able to do the above? Or are there other complexities to consider?

cc @jmwatts

[iansltx]

Revised the description of this ticket to be a little clearer about scope (and cleaned up story TODOs). This is a small, relatively generic, frontend-only change that improves the UX for auto-install/patch policies when they land but neither of those are a prereq for this.

Right now the frontend prioritizes the fleet_initiated flag above actor_full_name / actor_email when deciding what name/avatar to render on an activity, for e.g.

We want to prioritize the underlying user instead if provided.

This can be repro'd/validated by creating a policy (auto-install policy on a package works for this), then UPDATE'ing the associated activity in the database to set fleet_initiated = true. Currently I'd expect that to switch name/avatar even though author information is set. With the change we would instead show the same UI as if the flag hadn't been flipped.

@jmwatts Let me know if this clears things up. Since this is a tiny UX improvement that's getting drafted now, I expect this will be in place prior to #28060 and #28065, so those test plans would include checks for the policy add/edit/delete activity showing as Fleet-initiated in the database/API but with user authorship in the UI.

[jmwatts]

@iansltx

This can be repro'd/validated by creating a policy (auto-install policy on a package works for this), then UPDATE'ing the associated activity in the database to set fleet_initiated = true. Currently I'd expect that to switch name/avatar even though author information is set. With the change we would instead show the same UI as if the flag hadn't been flipped.

When I create a policy this way in 4.67.0 there is no activity item for the policy creation. There are only activity items for edit and delete. The only time a policy creation is tracked in the Activity feed is when I manually create the policy. Is this behavior we want to change?

[iansltx]

@jmwatts Yes. In fact, as far as I'm concerned the existing behavior is a bug and should be fixed separately.

[jmwatts]

@iansltx filed #28259