Broadcast Bug

Whenever you send out a broadcast to a specific group, it will send the broadcast to the group PLUS whoever you last sent an instant message too. With our work environment this is causing some crossover, so I figured I’d drop you guys a line and see if this was a known issue.

Thanks,

C

I think when you open the Broadcast window, it defaults to having the last person you chatted with’s name checkmarked. I usually open the Broadcast window, click the check-box to select all, then again to deselect all, then I checkmark the users I actually want to Broadcast to.

Yes. That works. But training 300 sales agents to take an extra 2 seconds to do anything more then they absolutely have to is way more headache than what I am paid for. Thus, I’ll report the bug and call it job well done!

I’m wondering if this was a design decision at some point when the Broadcast behavior was being built… not sure.

The actual behavior seems to be – whatever user you have selected/highlighted in the Spark window when you open the broadcast window, is the one that will be pre-checked. Not necessarily a bug per-say, but I can see where it may not be the expected behavior.

I’ve filed this an an “improvement”: SPARK-1554

Actually this was logged by me as a bug 4 years ago - SPARK-1088. I think it is a bug as i can’t think of any use case for this and it is just not clean behavior and only confusing users. As you can see it is unassigned (Walter removed his assignment and tagged it as Open Defects as long as i remember) so it is still open for someone to propose a patch.

Ok did some digging around…

This does appear to have been a design decision.

in package: org.jivesoftware.sparkimpl.plugin.alerts.BroadcastDialog

Start Line 170:

// Iterate through selected users.

for (ContactItem item : contactList.getSelectedUsers()) {

for (CheckNode node : nodes) {

if (node.getAssociatedObject().toString().equals(item.getJID())) {

node.setSelected(true);

}

}

}

This snippet looks to iterate through any highlighted/selected user on the Spark main window and then sets them to be checkmarked when the Broadcast window is opened. Basic use-case for this would be to Click a user, Hold down SHIFT, then click another user, then open Broadcast window and have all those users pre-selected – so you just type your message and hit the Send button.

So, we have to basically make a design decision as-to whether this behavior should remain or be removed, or if it should stay but be turned into a preference (via default.properties or something)…

With our work environment we have 300+ users separated into 20 or so departments/groups. So what ends up happening is someone will be talking to me (Helpdesk) and then broadcast a message to the sales agents trying to find someone to do an enrollment. For me it’s irritating, but there are certain situations where this is causing confusion between departments. I can see how on smaller setups this would be handy if you were using just one group in Spark, but in a larger environment that have users separated into groups it is definitely an undesired feature.

Just my two cents.

perhaps we have a “power user” mode ( <-- LOL) where you must have multiple items selected/highlighted for the Broadcast Window to pre-select them, otherwise if you have 1 or less items selected/highlighted, the Broadcast Window launches with no preselected users.

Idea being, if you are SHIFT clicking or CTRL clicking multiple contact list items then opening a Broadcast window with them all still highlighted, perhaps it’s intentional… thoughts?

To me it looks like a sloppy coding Yes, it is handy to Shift or Ctrl select a few users and then **right click **them to send a broadcast to selected users. But i’m not doing any right clicking when i press Broadcast menu option, so i see no point in still including previously selected user in this case. Actually this is not really a selecting. Clicking on a user in the roster is not selecting to me. You can do it accidentally by just trying to make roster window active… So if this can be done, the code should differentiate those scenarios, when just pressing the broadcast menu option should unselect all previously selected users.

Here’s a patch that will not preselect any users in the Broadcast window unless the user has deliberately selected multiple users on the Spark main contact pane. The only way to select multiple users is to SHIFT click or CTRL click on multiples of them… so, assumably this would be an intentional use.

thoughts?
SPARK_1088.patch.zip (617 Bytes)

That would work great for us. Plus you get to keep the original intended behaviour, albeit with a slightly modified way of intitiating it.

Patch is working great. I have assigned it to Tim (hopefully he will get online soon to commit it). Though i think it is time for you, Jason, to have your own commit rights

uh oh! here comes trouble!

Did this ever get patched in?

Not yet. I have assigned this to another developer, who was active yesterday, so maybe he will commit this patch.