We were writing the same text over and over for the same translations.
Since they all serve the same function, it's perfectly fine for them to
have the same text, and so we can have a shared translation.
This way we simplify the HTML and generating similar menus will be
easier. We also improve the experience for screen reader users, who
might have been hearing the icons as text because we weren't using the
`aria-hidden` attribute.
We're still keeping the "icon-" classes for compatibility with CONSUL
installations which might have changed this code.
From a semantic point of view, there's no reason to add a strong
emphasis to the menu items.
Besides, using CSS simplifies the code and is less error-prone. For
instance, the "stats" section didn't have a <strong> tag, and so it was
the only one which wasn't bold.
Now that there's no naming confict with the helper method used in the
ProposalsDashboardHelper, we can easily simplify the view, moving the
logic to the Ruby class.
The HTML `class` attribute was declared twice and so the second one was
being ignored.
In the case of messages, it was "working" properly because the
`class=is-active` part is not used on `<li>` tags when they've got a
`<ul>` inside them.
We no longer need to use the `menu_` prefix, since now these methods
aren't helper methods anymore, and so their names won't collide with
other helpers.
The planned budget investments redesign includes using icons in some
tables, so we might as well use them everywhere.
The original design used Foundation to show the tooltips. We're using
CSS in order to keep the ERB/HTML code simple. One advantage of using
CSS is we can show the tooltip on focus as well, just like accessibility
guidelines recommend [1]. On the other hand, Foundation tooltips appear
on the sides when the link is at the bottom of the page, making sure
they're visible in this case, while CSS tooltips do not. Neither CSS
tooltips nor Foundation tooltips are dismissable, which might be an
accessibility issue.
Note we aren't changing any ERB files in order to replace links with
icons; we're only changing CSS and one line of Ruby code.
[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/content-on-hover-or-focus
Note the CSS could probably be improved to avoid duplication with other
button style definitions. However, that's fine because we're going to
change the style of the links soon.
For the same reason, I haven't bothered to style every single link the
way it was until now.
This way we can remove duplication and simplify the code in the view.
Note we're not using the "within" method in the tests to access a row,
because it doesn't seem to work in components tests when passing the
`text:` option.
In the past we were using some <div> tags surrounding table action
links in order to guarantee these links wouldn't be wider that their
cell's space and wouldn't expand over two lines.
However, while these links didn't expand over two lines, at certain
resolutions the width of their text exceeded the width of the links,
causing part of the text to be outside their borders.
This behavior was also inconsistent: some tables had these <div> tags,
and some tables didn't.
Since we've now introduced the table actions component, the code is more
consistent and we're getting rid of these <div> tags. So now we're again
facing the issue where links could expand over two lines.
Using a flex layout solves this issue and considerably improves the
layout at lower resolutions.
This partial was going to get too complex since in some places we've got
different texts, different URLs or different confirmation messages.
While we should probably try to be more consistent and that would make
the partial work in most cases, there'll always be some exceptions, and
using a partial (with, perhaps, some helper methods) will become messy
really quickly.
While Rails provides a lot of functionality by default, there's one
missing piece which is present in frameworks like Django or Phoenix: the
so-called "view models", or "components".
It isn't easy to extract methods in a standard Rails view/partial, since
extracting them to a helper will make them available to all views, and
so two helper methods can't have the same name. It's also hard to
organize the code in modules, and due to that it's hard to figure out
where a certain helper method is supposed to be called from.
Furthermore, object-oriented techniques like inheritance can't be
applied, and so in CONSUL customizing views is harder that customizing
models.
Components fix all these issues, and work the way Ruby objects usually
do.
Components are also a pattern whose popularity has increased a lot in
the last few years, with JavaScript frameworks like React using them
heavily. While React's components aren't exactly the same as the
components we're going to use, the concept is really similar.
I've always liked the idea of components. However, there wasn't a stable
gem we could safely use. The most popular gem (cells) hasn't been
maintained for years, and we have to be very careful choosing which gems
CONSUL should depend on.
The view_component gem is maintained by GitHub, which is as a guarantee
of future maintenance as it can be (not counting the Rails core team),
and its usage started growing after RailsConf 2019. While that's
certainly not a huge amount of time, it's not that we're using an
experimental gem either.
There's currently a conflict between view_component and wicked_pdf.
We're adding a monkey-patch with the fix until it's merged in
wicked_pdf.
