Letter Avatars: Uppercase letters

1 Initial Problem

There are different types of usernames on ILIAS installations. The current mechanism takes the first 2 letters from the login if profile is deactivated. In some cases that current letter avatar mechanism doesn't look that nice.

r.duck => r.

Furthermore, profiles that are not shared work with lowercase letters and profiles that are shared work with uppercase letters. From our point of view a distinction is not absolutely necessary and would standardize the picture in galleries, participant lists, etc.. It is not clear to us why a distinction is made here. The fact that a profile is not published becomes apparent elsewhere.

see discussions in Letter Avatars

2 Conceptual Summary

We would like to standardize the use of Letter Avatars within an installation and wish for a standard rule that only uppercase letters or numbers are allowed for Letter Avatars.

1. Only use uppercase letters: Generate avatars with only letters in uppercase style for installations, even user name is not available: ILIAS then uses the first two letters of the login, but in uppercase style like others.
2. Do not use interpunctuation[1]: If login has punctuation marks, letter avatar should omit these and only use letters for letter avatars. (will be handled as bug fix if possible, see Mantis #22358)

Examples

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

• Administration > User Management > Settings
• Who-is-online-Tool
• Member Gallery
• ...
• everywhere where Letter Avatar is in use

3.2 User Interface Details

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

None.

4 Technical Information

{The maintainer has to provide necessary technical information, e.g. dependencies on other ILIAS components, necessary modifications in general services/architecture, potential security or performance issues.}

5 Contact

• Author of the Request: Yvonne Seiler, Universität Bern
• Maintainer: {Please add your name before applying for an initial workshop or a Jour Fixe meeting.}
• Implementation of the feature is done by: {The maintainer must add the name of the implementing developer.}

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• Universität Bern

7 Discussion

Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel], 08 APR 2019 : Two questions:

1. If you want to omit special characters, which character set would you accept? Uppercase Latin Alphabet? So for user Çelik Alptekin with enabled public profile the avatar would be EA, correct? And what's about Ömer Şahin? Would the avatar show MA instead of ÖŞ? Are there technical reasons for this limitation?
2. (This is more a question for the maintainer) The Jour Fixe said in its decision about Letter Avatars in 2017 "UI Icon could be used to generate letter avatars in a later version". Is this already happening? Or is it planned to do with this feature request?

Seiler, Yvonne [yvseiler], 09 APR 2019: Thank you very much for your early feedback.

Answer to 1.
I don't really care about all special characters, I have specified it a bit more in the article above. It's mainly about the "punctuation marks". Thanks for your hint.

On our installation we use user accounts that have a "." in second place (e.g. y.seiler). In the original Letter Avatars feature wiki article the JF pointed out that one should check if one could get rid of this (see above in the linked Mantis). Possibly this part of the article can already be solved with the Mantis ticket.

We have successfully implemented the concept that all profiles have uppercase letter avatars without a punction - but with a patch. We would like to bring this function into the core so that others can also use this advantage. That is why we wrote this article.

8 Implementation

{The maintainer has to give a description of the final implementation and add screenshots if possible.}

Test Cases

Test cases completed at {date} by {user}

• {Test case number linked to Testrail} : {test case title}

Approval

Approved at {date} by {user}.