[UI Enhancement] Contents and discovery details when viewing individual files

[bduranc]

Issue Type: Feature Request / Enhancement

I. PROBLEM STATEMENT

Often when reviewing a CD definition, a user will encounter various licenses found within the project’s files (so-called “Discovered” licenses). In some cases, these licenses are definitively identified and mapped to a valid SPDX identifier. In other cases, they are not (so-called “NOASSERTION” cases).

Due to the nature of examining these discovered licenses, the user will often be forced to look at each discovered file individually to determine exactly which case applies.

This task is made even more difficult due to the following reasons:

• When a user looks inside a file, there’s no indicator to show where the discovery was found.

• A user needs to open each file one-by-one. Fine for ten files, but problematic for one hundred.

Currently, when a user clicks on a file to open it, the file contents is displayed in a separate browser tab.

II. SOLUTION PROPOSAL

It is unlikely we can completely avoid the manual examination of these individual files, especially when it comes to verifying the NOASSERTION cases.

However, we can make UI/UX enhancements so users can perform this work more efficiently.

What if… when a user hovers over a specific file on the definition, they are presented with an overlay showing the contents of the file? There would be no separate browser tabs just to see the file contents.

By default, the top of the file would be shown, which would be useful when examining license headers.

In this overlay, the user would also interact with a “Jump to license discovery” drop-down menu that would bring them directly to the line(s) in the file that triggered the discovery and highlight them.

Because pop-up overlays can easily become a distracting nuisance, we’d set a minimum duration that the user must hover (e.g. 2 seconds) and provide an option to turn the functionality on or off globally.

The user should still be able to open the file in a new tab by clicking on it as is currently possible.

See below for a very crude mock-up that attempts to illustrate the functionality described above.

III. MOCK-UP

[bduranc]

I think this would still be a very relevant enhancement today as it would provide an alternative to examining the raw data when trying to determine what in a file specifically triggered a certain finding/ID. I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts on the usefulness of such an enhancement.

[bduranc]

At least within my own organization, we're finding that this and #973 are the two biggest reasons for end-user to deep-dive into a definition's raw data - to confirm a finding/ID because the exact level of that discovery is not surfaced effectively in the current UI.