Let the browser remember the creator of a silence

[ccmtaylor]

Currently, when a user creates silences, she needs to enter her name/email into
the creator field every time. Since the user will likely want to use the same
information every time, it makes sense to enable browser autocomplete for the
form field.

Please note that this is the first time I'm writing Elm, so let me know if I can improve things :)

[stuartnelson3]

Have you tested this? Checking in firefox and chromium, it doesn't seem to be working. I'm wondering if the issue has something to do with the model being updated.

[ccmtaylor]

it doesn't seem to be working

welp, you're right. I tested with the dev-server, which has no CSS and mistook the comment field for an empty autocomplete suggestion from firefox 😊 . I'll read up on autocomplete specs a bit more.

[w0rm]

@stuartnelson3 I only read the code and it looked fine, but apparently not working :)

@ccmtaylor I can help you with the dev server setup, so that you can get css working. I checked the autocomplete, and it seems that it is enabled by default, so it is not helpful. We can save the creator in the LocalStorage through ports and keep in the top level model.

1. Get the creator from LocalStoage and pass it as flags to the elm program (the same way production: true is passed here and then decoded here)
2. Put it somewhere in the model
3. Use it to fill the input field
4. When the form is submitted, update the creator in the model, plus send the creator through a port and update it in the LocalStorage on the JavaScript side.

[ccmtaylor]

@stuartnelson3 @w0rm it semi-works for me now in Chrome and Firefox. Some experimenting suggests that browsers seem to store autocomplete values under a key that's derived from the name attribute, though I couldn't find any documentation on this behaviour on MDN.

Testing on a local build of alertmanager, it seems like the browsers suggest values that I've previously entered in name="name" fields on other sites, but they don't remember new values I enter into the Creator field in alertmanager :(. This Stackoverflow entry suggests that this is because Elm handles the form entirely in JS and doesn't actually submit the form. The workaround involves a hidden iframe; I'm not sure if this is acceptable.

[stuartnelson3]

That's definitely an unfortunate side-effect of using elm, and I would rather not add a hidden iframe solution just to get around this.

@w0rm do you have any time to do your ports + local storage solution with @ccmtaylor ? that should be relatively few lines of code

[w0rm]

@stuartnelson3 I will have time this Friday, @ccmtaylor let me know if you would like to pair on this

[ccmtaylor]

thanks a bunch for helping me today, @w0rm! Really enjoyed it 🥇

[w0rm]

@ccmtaylor great work! I only have a couple comments

[w0rm]

Could you fix the indentation here?

[w0rm]

Sorry, I just thought that we don't really need defaultCreator to be a Maybe String and we can always keep it as an empty string if it's not set. This would make the code slightly simpler, and the decoder would be:

    |> Json.decodeValue (Json.field "defaultCreator" Json.string)
    |> Result.withDefault ""

[stuartnelson3]

@w0rm I'll leave this PR up to you, go ahead and merge it when you're happy with how it's working!

[w0rm]

@ccmtaylor great! let's wait for ci, and then merge