A dedicated file upload input type in issue forms

[foosel]

Picking this up from the closed preview ;)

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who requires log files and similar files from their users in order to be able to process a bug report. Right now the only option I have to request that from people is to instruct them to upload them via a textarea input. According to my experienced during the preview a ton of people will happily overlook instructions like this and thus I still have to still run after log files. Something like this:

- type: file
  attributes:
    label: Your `octoprint.log`
    description: You can find it under Settings > Logs in the web interface, or under `~/.octoprint/logs` on your Pi
    extensions: ["log", "zip"]
    pattern: "^octoprint.*\.log"
    required: true

with required, extensions (limiting visible file extensions in the file picker via accept on the HTML file input) and pattern (validation of input file name server side) being optional would be absolutely amazing!

Just being able to have a mandatory file upload would already help, even if extensions and pattern matching where left out. The problem I see is making people actually attach their logs. I've made do with a required checkbox that pretty much says "I have attached the required log below" but people will happily check that to proceed with issue submission but without actually uploading anything and I'm once again stuck without necessary information.

So, in order of priority, what I'd like to see is:

1. a dedicated file input type that can be marked as required,
2. allowing to optionally filter uploadable extensions as supported by the HTML file input's accept parameters,
3. and also allowing to further filter files by being able to provide a regex pattern for the upload file name which would be evaluated server side and only mark the input as fulfilled (so block the form submission if it's required) if there's a match

That would remove the biggest pain point I currently still have after close to half a year of using issue forms with OctoPrint.

[lukehefson]

Hey @foosel!

Thanks for this feedback and all the awesome context!

Yes, I agree that at the very root – the biggest issue here is that even if you try to work around with a required textarea (and checkbox to prompt them to confirm) – a user can still easily get confused and submit the textarea with content but no attachment to the input 😕.

This is definitely something we've been considering and we'll continue to talk about how it could work and what it might take to make it happen.

Thanks again!

[foosel]

@lukehefson Any progress on this? 😶

Had a release ten days ago and that prompted a whole bunch of new ones:

OctoPrint/OctoPrint#4267
OctoPrint/OctoPrint#4268
OctoPrint/OctoPrint#4265
OctoPrint/OctoPrint#4262
OctoPrint/OctoPrint#4261
OctoPrint/OctoPrint#4258

This is incredibly frustrating, they just set the checkbox and then don't upload, and I'm back to constantly running after logs. And I can't even make a bot to check this, because some people won't upload the requested file but instead paste a link to some cloud share, which then would cause a false negative check.

[lukehefson]

Sorry to hear about this @foosel – I can appreciate how it's frustrating.

There unfortunately isn't any news of progress from our side on this– but it's safe to say that it's one of the top features we'd like to add to issue forms when we have the capacity!

[nallath]

We also suffer from the same problem, exactly the same as Foosel. We can't write a bot because of the many and varied ways that people post logs / project files.

What also makes this harder is that often people then post the logs as an attachment via email, which gets filtered out. The users don't get a notification that this happens, so it then takes us 3-4 posts extra to get the log info.

I'm not quite sure if the last bit is also something to discuss with you, but could it be possible to send an email if someone responds via email and adds an attachment (and in that automatic email tell them what they have to do to get the attachment to us?)

[foosel]

I've now decided I'll rather risk having some people get frustrated by a false positive than getting frustrated myself constantly and wrote a quick workflow step that checks whether a ticket's first post contains the expected upload and if not demands it. It's far from perfect and having the issue form actually enforce an upload would definitely be way better, but at this point it's either that or my mental health.

The workflow step in question.

[SanAndreaP]

@lukehefson Any updates on this? I'm currently in the process of adopting issue forms for my repos and having an easily available and on-site upload for files like logs and/or screenshots would be great.

Or even just allowing drag-and-drop into the form area (like it is done with the regular issue submission page) and just having those appear at the end of the submission would be a good start.

[shawnthompson]

We are trying to do the same thing with screen shots and documents (Word files) for content and I realized you can attach those in the

  - type: textarea

I think I'll add instructions to do that until a new upload element is created.

[saadrahim]

Lack of this feature is impacting many customers. Can we get a timeline for its enablement? Is there someone to reach out to help prioritize this?