The GUI for scoping variables by tenant tag is very unintuitive, to the point that we thought in our team that it’s impossible until we read in the documentation that it’s available and had to actively dig into the UI to find it.
When defining a new variable value, the UI looks like this:
To get to the tenant tags, I have to open the editor:
then Define Scope:
Why isn’t the tenant tag selector available in the same way as all the other selectors (env, role, target, step, channel). This is not only unintuitive and hard to find, but it also makes variables editing very slow if there are many tenant-dependent values to be set.
Hi Jakub,
Thanks for getting in touch and for going into detail about this issue.
We agree this is not discoverable or very intuitive at present.
The reason we didn’t include a filter here was due to the nature of each tenant tag set having multiple tags. A single dropdown for all tag sets, each with their own tags quickly becomes overwhelming, and if we populated multiple dropdowns here for each tag set, we found that got out of control for customers working with tens/hundreds of tenant tag sets. So we made the decision to limit this from the in-line variable scoping filter, and instead leave all that responsibility to the variable dialog’s scoping page.
This does however, as you say, make it difficult for discoverability and monotonous for data entry, because it takes you out of the flow of editing the variables in-line (especially if you’re using keyboard shortcuts to quickly enter/edit variables).
We’ve created a GitHub issue here with our thoughts on how we can improve this, that you can track to be notified when a fix is available. If you have any thoughts on how you’d like to see this improved (other than the approaches we’ve mentioned in the issue), we’d welcome any comments on this issue.
In terms of a workaround for now, one shortcut that’s not obvious is the “Open editor” link at the bottom of that scoping popover. This goes straight to the scoping page of the variable editor dialog, so you can easily select your tags without having to switch to the “define scope” page first. Not ideal, but a little easier than opening the variable editor and having to switch to the scoping page.
Hope this helps.
Cheers
Mark
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the detailed response. I appreciate it and I hope your team can find a way to improve this experience. What you described on GitHub is fine, except the workaround doesn’t work in some cases - the “Open editor” link works differently when editing an existing variable (it opens the scoping popover), but differently when defining a new one (it opens the variable editor popover, so you still have to make another click to get to the scoping popover). Is this a separate bug?
Kuba J
Hi Kuba J,
You are correct. But this would fall into the same bucket as that issue. I’ve updated the description, so we’ll make sure that gets addressed.
Thanks
Mark
