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Application: support-api

API for processing GOV.UK named requests and anonymous feedback

GitHub
support-api
Ownership
#govuk-platform-engineering owns the repo. #govuk-platform-support receives automated alerts for this repo.
Category
APIs
Links

README

This app provides an API for storing and fetching anonymous feedback about pages on GOV.UK. Data comes in from the feedback app on the public-facing frontend and is read by the support app on the admin-facing backend. Alternatively, some types of feedback are sent to Zendesk so it can be acted on by the support teams directly.

Support API can receive feedback about any page on GOV.UK, but all it is sent is the path. We use the content-store to look up extra information (content_id, associated organisations, etc) about these pages to allow for better search and filtering of the feedback.

Support API also stores ratings for services. It aggregates those ratings every day in order to keep the size of the database manageable - see config/schedule.rb for more details. Previously the aggregate ratings were uploaded to the performance platform, which no longer exists.

Nomenclature

  • Feedback: Everything stored in the app is considered to be “feedback” of some form or other and relates to pages published on GOV.UK. Confusingly most of the data also comes from the feedback app, but when we talk about feedback in the context of the support-api we don’t usually mean the feedback app, we mean the data stored in the database.
  • Anonymous Contact: All feedback stored in this app is anonymous. This is in contrast with the Named Contact feedback that is sent directly to the support app. All feedback in this app is scanned to see if it may contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and flagged if we think it might.
  • Service Feedback: This is feedback that came from the short survey on a “done” page and contains a 1-5 rating for what the user thought of the service.
  • Page Improvement: Unlike other feedback types, this is not stored in the database, but instead is sent directly to Zendesk to be handled by the GOV.UK support team.

Technical documentation

This is a Ruby on Rails app, and should follow our Rails app conventions.

You can use the GOV.UK Docker environment to run the application and its tests with all the necessary dependencies. Follow the usage instructions to get started.

Use GOV.UK Docker to run any commands that follow.

Running the test suite

bundle exec rake

Further documentation

Licence

MIT License