Consider formatted output for comments, e.g. could use Markdown

[srabraham]

The comments in IMS could be made to allow simple Markdown formatting, such that it's displayed that way after comments are appended. It especially seems like it'd be useful to support ordered lists (1. 2. 3.) or unordered lists (* * *).

Goals

• Find an appropriate jQuery compatible field editor library / component which ideally outputs MarkDown
• Editor should be use-able by non-devs who don't know what MarkDown is.
• Disable any features that aren't compatible or aren't reasonable for our use case (images/video until we add that feature)
• We may need a separate MarkDown view library for display.
• Decide how to handle any summary versions of those fields.
• Implement Editor in report creation screens
• Implement Editor in report edit screens
• Implement Editor in incident creation screens
• Implement Editor in incident edit screens
• Implement Viewer in report detail screens
• Implement Viewer in incident detail screens
• Implement Viewer in report list screens (if needed)
• Implement Viewer in incident list screens (if needed)

Related Issues

• Front-end work will be needed to accommodate this, both the legacy FE and the new React FE [FEATURE] Add formatting ability for report body fields ranger-ims-web#1064 is the React FE issue.

[srabraham]

Wood Ape mentioned something like this in our call tonight

[chaoticbear]

I think this is mostly a front-end task, though it's possible we may need to modify the model here a bit to handle formatted fields (or flag them as formatted)

So I think we'll want to update the legacy FE in this repo and make any model changes needed, in addition to the React FE. I've created an issue for the React FE and added it to the description.

[srabraham]

This idea is in early stages, and I'd love to hear Tool's thoughts too

[chaoticbear]

I added a rough outline for notation purposes of what we need to figure out / do. Obviously it can change as we go.