EBMS Tickets

We talked to the travel support staff and there are three main improvements we'd like to make (as possible):

1. Please give each type of expense its own line. The confirmation e-mail that Board members receive if they request it is pretty close to this. The message that travel staff receive is more jumbled.
2. If there is no expense entered, the item should not be in the e-mail. Currently, "Transportation Expenses" and "Parking and Toll Expenses" appear on the e-mail with $ and a blank if nothing is entered. If "I did not stay at a hotel" is chosen, there is still a blank line with "Amount:"
3. Staff would still like to see the dollar amounts line up in a column so they can more easily calculate the amount due.

Bob, this should be moved back to "open" but I don't know how to to that.

This is more complicated (to implement) than we originally estimated.

After discussion with the users, we concluded that it was not feasible to align expense amounts, partly because some of the values are mileage, not dollars, partly because the current system is not set up to use rich text formatting for the email messages, and largely because the data is free text, not constrained to monetary numbers. The rest of the requests have been implemented on DEV. I've suppressed the empty fields. The multiply-occurring blocks (transportation expenses and parking & toll expenses) have each expense on a separate line, unless there's only one expense in the category, in which case it's in line.

Bob, could you please add a line break after the meeting date and before "Transportation Expenses:"? Thanks.

It appears that if I put a line break after the meeting the Webforms module puts the value for that field on a separate line, like this:

Submitted on Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - 10:29
Submitted by user: Test Board Member

Meeting:
QA Event1 - 2014-04-23

Transportation Expenses: Taxi - 8/12/2014 - $12
Hotel: NCI paid for my hotel
Meals and Incidentals: Per diem requested
Honorarium: Honorarium requested
Reimbursement: Work
Certify: I certify that the above information is true and correct to the best
of my knowledge.*


The results of this submission may be viewed at:
http://ebms.rksystems.com/node/2/submission/182

Is that acceptable, or would you prefer the layout without the extra line breaks?

I think the line breaks are helpful. Would it also be possible to put line breaks between the individual expense items? Since the support staff will be reading each line carefully to look for dollar or mileage amounts, having extra space might be helpful here, too.

Can you give me some examples of how you want the message formatted? (Each expense is already on its own line.)

To clarify my last request, now that each expense is on its own line, I just wondered if there could be blank lines between each expense. Just trying to add more white space between expenses so it's easier for the support staff to tally the amounts. (If this isn't helpful, please let me know and I will come up with an example.)

I have added the requested additional blank lines. The third-party package (webforms) with which the travel requests were implemented make it very awkward to control the email output formatting, so the code for this request is more fragile than I would like.

Iris forwarded the test e-mails she received and they look much better. Verified on DEV.

Iris forwarded the new text e-mails from QA and they still look good. Verified on QA.

Closing issue, but opening a new one (OCEEBMS-256) because the e-mail received by the admin staff does not contain the dates of travel (which members enter when they complete the form).