Time format for Total Activity

[nikosd]

This is more of a bug report. Under People there is a column that shows the total activity of each person in the course. The time is unfortunately shown in a strange format where it is hard to know whether it is hours and minutes or minutes and seconds shown (example attached). The format seems to vary from xx:yy to xx:yy:zz and the first part may even go beyond 99 that becoming xxx:yy:zz. The column also displays the values aligned to the left which make the values harder to compare visually. 

This needs to be fixed so that

1. the column is always aligned to the right

2. the values are always displayed with hours, minutes and seconds (minimum two digits per part) (for people with no activity it is fine as it is that the cell is empty)

[Stef_retired]

Thanks for sharing this idea,  @nikosd ; it's open for voting. For context, the View Users section of https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-26343-how-do-i-use-the-people-page-in-a-course-as-an-instru... explains the design of the hours:minutes:second format.

[James]

I feel that the right alignment should be implemented.

I also acknowledge that we can only view life through the experiences that we have had and cannot begin to imagine how someone else sees things that we have no experience or knowledge of. I could have never imagined (it is so far outside the realm of my experiences in the United States) that students in some countries could return to the courses after an indeterminate delay and pick up where they left off, even if it was 13 years later, and that the school had to support that.

Representation of date and time vary based on location and language (locale). I do not know of any place using Canvas that does not right-align times in a column within a table, but I have not used every language in Canvas, either.

I do not agree with the zero-padding on the left. It may be locale specific, but in the United States, we do not preface times with 0's and most people do not use 24 hour clocks (06:00 for 6 am). On the other hand, according to a Wikipedia page with no citations, in Sweden, "leading zeros are mostly used in time notation": Date and time notation in Sweden

I had forgotten how badly it looked because I wrote a script that will format it and allow you to click at the top of any column, including total activity, to sort it by that column. Mine looks like this:

Unfortunately, because Canvas does not put any class names or data roles in the columns and the number of columns can vary based off of your role in the course, it's hard to have a blanket CSS rules that applies. My script resorted to specifying the headers in each column and looks for those. That's very unfriendly to anyone other than people using the American English locale.

Because the last activity is formatted in a human friendly form, it becomes difficult to parse with any kind of support for other locales besides the one I wrote it for. Having a data attribute to specify the actual time in seconds would make sorting easier.

I feel that the People roster page could use a lot of attention, but left-padding timestamps with 0's is probably a locale issue.

[ProductPanda]

Comments from Instructure

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