Text boxes for announcing application-specific changes

Hello,

One of our application support specialists has asked if there is a way to easily announce application-specific changes to users of an application from that application’s launch page in Interactive Apps. I know we can modify the description in the app’s manifest.yml to include such verbiage, but he would really prefer the users see the list of recent changes in a text box. Is this something that can easily be done now? Or would this require changes to the OOD source code?

Thank you,

Richard

1 Like

The manifest.yml supports multiline markdown and inline html tags. Here is an example manifest.yml for RStudio:

---
name: RStudio Server
category: Interactive Apps
subcategory: Servers
role: batch_connect
description: |
  This app will launch [RStudio Server] an IDE for [R] on the [Owens cluster].

  [RStudio Server]: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio-server/
  [R]: https://www.r-project.org/
  [Owens cluster]: https://www.osc.edu/resources/technical_support/supercomputers/owens

  <div class="alert alert-info" >
    <strong>Recent updates</strong>
    <ul>
      <li>Added R version 3.6.0 as an option.</li>
      <li>Add ability to choose "debug" as node type.</li>
    </ul>
  </div>

And here is the screenshot:

What is the problem you have?

  1. Is it with this approach the process of updating the manifest.yml?
  2. Is it that you want the recent updates to appear somewhere else besides the top of the web form?

If the UI is fine but you want to update more easily than modifying the manifest.yml, you could put an empty div in the manifest.yml where updates would go and add to form.js a query to fetch the update html fragment and insert it if it exists.

Thanks, guys. This is helpful.