Decluttering and improvement request. 'Email' as results Publication Preference not honoured correctly

lemoene commented 6 years ago

Copied verbatim from the Bika Water tracker, should somebody be targeting this area

Much confusion was generated by the Email option as all of the CSV and PDF etc. are also sent by email. As a publications preference, Email refers to be the results in the email body as HTML.

Results in the email body is good for those users that don't need the Certificate and just need to scan the results. At the moment users that have email and PDF selected but just gets a PDF. Which means a sometimes irritating double click, pdf viewer load, and scrolling. The LIMS can be slicker than that and it comes at little cost?

This request be the reference to all future discussion on the topic of

Bika Results Publication Preferences and their meaning

In the end Bika should offer the following publication preferences, like it used to be, except for dropping Fax which clients did not ask for lately. Also see https://demo.bikalabs.com/knowledge-centre/manual/bika-3-user-manual/clients/client-contacts

Email body - this means html in the email body. QC managers only want to see the results, and don't need a PDF.

PDF - a PDF document, signed etc, that lab clients can distribute with their products. I often see these arriving in the packaging with Reference Samples from Suppliers. The PDF is distribute as an email attachment, like the CSV, and I think that causes the confusion with the Email option above. The PDF gets uploaded on the AR's published results tab.

CSV - previously poorly called 'File', a spreadsheet with the results, also gets distributed by email and uploaded on the AR's published results tab

Print - in resource-poor settings, and some times preferred in not so poor settings too, the COA gets automatically printed on Publication of the AR, and then manually distributed. A print of the PDF mentioned above, and also gets uploaded to the Published results tab of the AR

SMS results - used by labs with poor connectivity. The essentials of the COA gets sent by SMS, typically to Doctors at remote clinics

SMS Notification - just a notification that the results are available online, including a hyperlink. Typically used in environments where users are not always at their PCs, such as in agriculture

Edit:

Regulatory standard CSV in Wine, Beer and Cannabis labs. For 'Interfacing' government systems in lagging enviro

Oracle, SAP etc These are around too

Steps to reproduce

Navigate to a Client Contact's Publication preferences tab

Current behavior

Only Email and PDF is offered, in a confusing way. There are more formats already in Bika Water and Cannabis have CSVs, and SMS can easily be added via an email to SMS service (in the first worlds), Bika 1 did that for faxing already.

Expected behavior

The option be called COA publication prefefrences, in a less confusing way

xispa commented 6 years ago

ramonski commented 6 years ago

Closed in favor of #342.

Please note that although we appreciate any kind of improvement request, we can't keep track of them in this tracker and would therefore encourage you to open a Pull Request directly and we'll be happy to give our feedback and eventually merge it into master.

Thanks for understanding.

senaite / senaite.core