A Firefox extension written for Northwestern IT to extend the functionality of the Footprints IT Service Manager. Based on code from the OG Footprints Extension used by Tier 1 students to streamline daily work.
The current v1.0 release is provided as-is in the releases page. It is not signed (coming soon) and thus must be loaded manually as a temporary add-on. As soon as Mozilla signs the add-on the releases page will be updated with a new ZIP. From there the extension can easily be installed permanently by loading the .zip file into Firefox.
Eventually, the extension should get approved for distribution on the Firefox add-on store, and will be available at
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/footprintsplusplus/
Render a more modern, card based layout on the tickets homepage. Issues should be much more readable and pleasant to look at. Each separate ticket is now a card. The UI functions much the same as the original page, albeit only displaying critical information on first glance. The ticket number in the bottom left is colored based on issue status, and it can be clicked to copy the ticket number. Critical tickets also get a dangerous looking outline to really draw your attention.
Along with the card layout comes a new navbar that scrolls with the page, so you can search and perform other functions no matter how many tickets you are looking at on any given page.
The extension creates a favicon charm in your extension toolbar, this is a quick way to know you are running the extension. Clicking this takes you to the settings page where you can edit your preferences. The footer also tells you what extension version you are running.
This extension provides a number of features that improve the experience of using Footprints.
Since Footprints has nearly 1000 distinct categories, it can be difficult to remember where all of them are or even to know that some of them exist. This extension provides a method of searching for categories and displaying the closest matching ones.
In the case that multiple categories match your search terms, the dropdown above the search box will allow you to select from one of them.
Similarly to categories, since Northwestern has somewhere in the area of 150 assignment groups (in this workspace alone), this extension provides a search box for assignees. The search enables you to search for any of these fields:
- An individual's NetID
- An individual's name
- An assignment group's name
For example, to find NUIT-TSS-USSTier2, you could search for "sst" (since that's in the name), "kbb0737" (a member's NetID), or "barnick" (part of a member's name).
To make finding a Quick Issue Template easier, the extension adds a search bar to the left of the template menu. The template list will be filtered to show only templates whose names contain the entered text (case-insensitive).
Generally, because of the way that Footprints was written, tickets end up opening in new windows the majority of the time, regardless of whether your browser is configured to prefer new tabs or new windows. This extension changes that and makes it such that tickets open in new tabs in most places. This behavior can be disabled in the extension settings.
Because of the way that the Footprints address book form was designed, when pressing "Enter" or "Return" to auto-fill contact information for a ticket, this sometimes caused the last description for a ticket to open in a new window. This extension resolves that issue.
To view images that are attached to Footprints tickets, Footprints requires that they be downloaded to your computer and then viewed using a photo viewer on your desktop.
This extension allows for image attachments (.png, .gif, .bmp, and .jpg) and text attachments (.csv, .txt, and .json) to be previewed when hovering over the Download button for said attachment.
The Footprints WYSIWYG editor has plenty of glitches in its behavior. Often, a description that looked good while typing appears different after being submitted and results in tickets that have strange discrepancies in formatting, like this one:
This extension adds what we lovingly call the Fixify button to the description editor. When you click the Fixify button, the following happens to your ticket description:
- All background highlight colors are removed from the text.
- The text is all set to 13px (10pt) Verdana.
- The color of all text in the ticket is set to black (except for links).
Of note, bolded, italicized, or indented text will remain bolded, italicized, or indented. All of the above changes will still be made.
Even when it appears that the formatting of a new ticket description is okay, we recommend using the Fixify button to ensure that all redundant and unnecessary formatting is cleared from the text before submitting. Often, the offending formatting tags are already in the text but don't cause an issue until the email has already been sent to the user. Fixify prevents that.
The current number of columns is hardcoded to 3, pending possible change to 4. This should really be configurable by the user as everyone's monitor/setup is different. A future release will allow users to specify a custom column-size in the settings.
This honestly should've been implemented first; take the original FP table style view and just throw bootstrap and spacing at it. Simple and familiar, yet elegant and refreshing. Will probably be the next order of business after bugs are resolved.
Code for pickup_ticket and assign_my_team already exists and has been tested (mostly). It needs a GUI implementation, although you could always open the console and call the methods manually if you're curious.
There is so much info thrown at you on the ticket page, when you probably only need to interact with 4-5 things (for a simple update anyway). The new ticket page will present relevant info in an easy-to-digest format, and hide everything else behind toggles.
Not really sure how to reproduce it yet, but sometimes the offset between the
navbarandcardsdiv is set to the collapsed version instead of the correct viewport's version. Refreshing the page with either the built in refresh button orF5solves the issue.
Sometimes FP doesn't fetch new tickets when loading the homepage, or after the auto refresh. This leaves the
cardrender engine with nothing to draw. Refreshing the page with either the built in refresh button orF5solves the issue.