Display Improvements Needed for Patron Alerts

[Michele Morgan]

Information about patron blocks and alerts displays in the sidebar of the patron record. STAFF_CHR blocks and ALERT_NOTEs both have title and text fields that can contain pertinent information. The sidebar display needs some improvements to display more useful information to staff users.

Currently, on the sidebar 40 characters of standing_penalty.label OR the title field in actor.usr_message displays in bold red text.

A mouseover displays in fine black text and includes:
- Penalty name (actor.usr_standing_penalty.name)
- Message database id (actor.usr_message.id)
- Note Text (actor.usr_message.message)

Many migrated messages have pertinent information in the usr_message.title field. Since this field is cut off at 40 characters in the sidebar, the information is not visible unless the staff user navigates to the patron's Notes tab, locates the note in question, and reads the title there via the mouseover.

For starters, I'd like to see a larger limit for the title field on the sidebar.

And for the mouseover:

- Remove the penalty name (or push it to the end)
- Remove the message database id
- Include full note title before the note text

Suggestions welcome since this can be largely unstructured data,

[Eva Cerninakova (ece)]

I agree with Michele on basically all points

However, I'm not sure if truncating to 40 characters is a problem or not. Maybe this can really be annoying when it comes to some migrated notes, and double the number of characters would be better (even for new notes).

The name of the penalty at the beginning of the note is really distracting; however, I think the penalty name could be useful information in some cases, so it makes sense to me to push it to the end, as Michele has suggested.

In connection with the notes, I'm also thinking about the old xul interface, where it was possible to differentiate the patron account status or type of message or penalty according to the color. This was quite useful, in my opinion. Staff could tell at a glance what the status of a patron's account was or what type of message or penalty it was. I remember that there were quite a few of these colors (see https://evergreenindiana.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2.2-Evergreen-Patrons-colors.pdf), but I believe that using a reasonable amount of colors to differentiate at least some types of messages might be useful.