re-think add story flow

[jpetto]

after a recent meeting with the curation team, it came to our attention that when adding a story we will potentially need to display additional information.

when a story is added, we will need to return an array of previous times this story ran. if this array is not empty, there should be a display for the user notifying them of these previous runs.

just to sketch it out:

• i enter a URL into the box and click Add Story
• the story adds successfully, but it turns out this story ran once in 2018 and once in 2020
• the user sees a success message, and then messaging like: "this story was previously run on: 2018-03-04, 2020-05-10"

this will likely change the user flow for adding a story. we may just keep the user on the add story page and display these messages and let the user navigate elsewhere on their own.

note that we may only need to display the last time a story ran, and not all previous runs.

[nina-py]

If a story has run previously, wouldn't it be rejected by the API as it already exists in the system and can't be added again? In the current flow the user goes straight to the Edit & Approve form where there is a "History" field that is supposed to show this information. It is at the bottom of the form though and not very prominent.

[jpetto]

we are still in discussion with the curation team about this.

in the current system, a story can run again, but this requires the curation team to manually go into a web page representation of the database table and delete the previous entry. (yikes is right.)

they do still want the ability to allow a story to run multiple times, however right now it's unclear how that will work. i'm working on getting a meeting with the relevant people to figure this out.

[nina-py]

I see - so the History field in the Figma comps with some data in it is not what the old tools are capable of showing now, it's what the editors would like to have in the new app? I guess it would make sense to be able to add a story by URL and not have it rejected by the API - instead you'd make sure the user knows it has run before and potentially offer to add it back to the queue of pending prospects.

But you would also have to be careful not to modify anything that's not yet run but scheduled to do so in the near future. Instead of adding a story this feature, in effect, would become a kind of story lookup/search by URL, and only if nothing has been found, you'd parse the metadata and add a new story.

[jpetto]

I see - so the History field in the Figma comps with some data in it is not what the old tools are capable of showing now, it's what the editors would like to have in the new app?

this is correct as far as i know.

But you would also have to be careful not to modify anything that's not yet run but scheduled to do so in the near future. Instead of adding a story this feature, in effect, would become a kind of story lookup/search by URL, and only if nothing has been found, you'd parse the metadata and add a new story.

this is a very good call out and something we need to verify with the curation team. but i think it will likely work as you describe here. the states i see are:

• story has not been run. parse it and add it to the prospects.
• story was run in the past. tell curators when the story last ran and allow them to confirm running again before parsing and adding to prospects.
• story is currently scheduled to run. ?? (guessing we tell the curator this and reject creating a new prospect.)
• story is currently live. ?? (guessing we tell the curator this and reject creating a new prospect.)