Stroked and Bored

Even though this release was months in the making, entailing changes to over 6,000 lines of code, it will likely appear to you, dear reader, as rather modest in scope. Useful certainly, but rather run-of-the-flathead-mill^*. That's because most of what's changed is under the hood. So let's talk about what you can see.

UI Refresh

Arguably, the most significant change is that requests no longer open in a popup window that overlays the inspection board. Instead, requests now open in a screen of their own—along with the collaboration tools.

This addresses several important issues:

• It makes more screen real estate available to team members viewing or responding to a request. This is especially useful for laptop users.

• It allows team members to access chat and view scribe notes without closing the request they are working on.

• Performance is enhanced by reducing memory consumption and making fewer database reads. (We also fine tuned the collaboration tools.)

By the way, it’s that last bullet that describes the actual impetus behind these changes; performance. Ready Room users should experience a noticeable improvement in response time. While we here at Synclinical should see better server utilization.

Moving requests to their own screen necessitated or otherwise enabled some other minor but noticeable UI changes. To wit:

• The collaboration tools (chat, scribe notes, etc.) now take up the entire right side of the screen. The various buttons that were above the presence indicator have moved left.

• The download buttons have been replaced with a download dropdown.

• Breadcrumbs have been updated to be both more attractive and more useful in navigating around an inspection. You will rely on breadcrumbs to return to the inspection board from a request.

• When viewing a request, a new sticky header is rendered at the top, keeping critical information always in view.

• The Request and Actors sections have been swapped to put request information on top, which is the natural order of things: make a request then assign contributors.

• Countless other little nips and tucks.

Easily Add Existing Members to an Inspection

Typeahead (aka auto-complete) is finally available for adding team members to an inspection. Now when you place the cursor in the input field, you are presented with a list of Ready Room users in your account who are not already members of the inspection. You can scroll the list and click to select. Or you can type a few characters of the desired user’s name or email to narrow the list down until that user is on top, then hit tab or return to select.

Of course, you can still enter a new users' email address, but now we validate addresses every time you hit the tab key or leave the input area. If the entry is a properly formatted email address, it’s accepted and rendered as a yellow chip. If not, you will get an error message or, if the illegal address is entered along with legal ones, it is simply removed. Notably, pasting in email addresses that also contain full names and angle brackets, e.g. Denise Lacey <dlacey@synclinical.com>, now works.

As before, no one is actually added to the inspection until you hit the “Invite” button.

Quickly Activate and Stage Requests

Not too long ago, we added functionality to support copying a request. Since that functionality was duplicative of the older stage/activate functionality, that was removed. Turns out, however, that people really liked being able to move a staged request quickly and easily. So now it’s back.

When you click the “Copy / Activate” button on a staged request, you will find a new(ish) “Activate” button on the top. Click it, and the request is moved—not copied!—to the Active board in its entirety, including contributors and attachments.

As noted on the screen, the newly activated request will get a new ID appropriate for the Active board, and will no longer be accessible via its old ID.

Furthermore, all of this is true in reverse. That is, you can stage an active request. Although, generally, the only reason for doing so is because you created an active request when you meant to create a staged one.

Updated GCP Storyboard Templates

We have updated the GCP storyboard templates to reflect changes to the BIMO manual and GCP E6 R3. In addition, we have made it more clear which part of the templates customers should update by highlighting them in yellow.

Download List of Released Files

By customer request, there’s a new download available. You can now download a list of every file that’s been released to an inspector as a CSV. (This is also why downloads moved to a dropdown.)

Purge an Inspection

We actually slipped this into production several weeks ago at the bequest of a customer, but we're publicly announcing it now. It is now possible to purge an inspection. That is, admins can hard-delete all inspection data and all uploaded documents. Permanently and irrevocably!

This functionality can be found on the inspection configuration popup, where there’s a new “Delete” button in the lower right corner. We don’t want to make purging an inspection something done casually, so clicking the button will route you to a confirmation screen that we hope is sufficiently scary. From there you will need to type (not paste) your domain name before we actually purge anything.

Why would you want to do this? Security mostly. Inspections are moments in time. It’s not necessarily useful to have old inspections and their associated documents sitting around. And while we take great pride in our security posture, it’s fair to ask "why tempt fate?" If you know you’re never returning to an inspection and you’ve downloaded all the relevant data, go ahead and delete it.

Tweaks and Fixes

• Ready Room did not allow the same inspection name to be used twice in an account. That validation has now been scoped down to a program.
• In rare circumstances, it was possible to attempt to apply a label that had just been deleted. This has been addressed.

Maintenance

We continue to enhance our CI/CD functionality, allowing us better visibility and control over what gets moved into test and production.

We have upgraded a key component of our underlying application server platform, making Ready Room current with the 1.0 version of Phoenix LiveView. Consequently, we also upgraded a number of related packages. Keeping current with application libraries is an important component of good security practice.

Our automated tests continue to grow. We now have 1,047 tests, 25% more than just 3 months ago.

* Car enthusiasts and Beach Boys fans will get that joke.