feat: Improve Tagging of users in large organizations

[enyineer]

🔖 Need

Large organizations like ours (with over 15k Users in their Backstage Catalog) sometimes have difficulties to mention specific Users.

We import the Users displayName from LDAP like this: Lastname, Firstname.

In such large Userbases, there often are many overlapping people with the same Lastname. You can't search for them by typing @Lastname, Firstname, because the space in between last and first name removes the search popup.

Currently our users sometimes have to build the Tag by themselves, looking up the Users ID they want to mention and then writing @users:default/<userid>. This is quite error prone and needs extra steps.

📝 Proposal

I suggest that the popup for mentions has an extra Input Field Users can use to search for names, getting more results they can chose from or create an inline input field in the Editor Users can use to search for names.

🔄 Alternatives

The alternative is described in the Need description. It is error prone and not really usable.

Are you willing to submit a PR?

No, but I'm happy to collaborate on a PR with someone else

[drodil]

Thanks for this issue. Unfortunately, I am not sure it's possible to add an input to the pop-up very easily. The editor uses https://github.com/andrerpena/react-mde, which is no longer maintained at all, and in its current state, it does not allow specifying a custom component for the pop-up. You could use the qeta.entityKinds to support users, but it's again a bit of a workaround.