Move Recent Activity Into A Global Activity Panel

[b-at-neu]

Goal

Move "Recent activity" out of the dashboards and into one panel reachable from anywhere in the app.

Today ActivityFeed is a SectionCard rendered on all three dashboards (admin-dashboard.tsx, manager-dashboard.tsx, user-dashboard.tsx), fed by getMyRecentActivity and getRecentApplications. It's only visible while standing on the dashboard.

Scope decision: no unread state. The feed stays derived from existing data — no schema change, no lastSeenNotificationsAt, no badge, no mark-as-read. This ticket relocates and improves access to information the app already computes. Per-item read state can come later if it's ever wanted.

Where the trigger goes

There is no shared persistent header — app-shell.tsx is sidebar (desktop, md:flex) + MobileNav (mobile, md:hidden) + main. So the trigger needs a home in both. They're structurally parallel, which makes this clean:

• Desktop — sidebar.tsx, the h-14 header bar. It currently holds only the logo link and has free space to its right. Add the trigger there with ml-auto.
• Mobile — mobile-nav.tsx, the existing ml-auto cluster. That cluster already holds the hamburger SheetTrigger; the activity trigger goes immediately to its left, so the cluster reads [activity] [menu].

Both headers are h-14 with the same bg-sidebar border-sidebar-border treatment and the same logo block, so the control lands top-right on both breakpoints — one position to learn.

Rejected alternatives, and why:

• Sidebar footer beside UserMenu — puts it bottom-left on desktop and top-right on mobile. Two different places for one control.
• A NavList entry — nav items navigate to routes. A control that opens a drawer shouldn't sit among them pretending to be a destination.

The panel itself

• Sheet with side="right". components/ui/sheet.tsx already exists, docs/DESIGN.md establishes Sheet as this app's drawer pattern, and one component works at every breakpoint. side="right" matters — MobileNav's menu sheet is side="left", so opposite sides keep the two drawers from reading as the same surface.
• Use CONCEPT_ICONS.activity, not a bell. A bell promises unread counts this ticket deliberately doesn't have. The activity icon is already the one on the current SectionCard, so the vocabulary stays consistent — see Standardize Lucide Iconography Across The App #572.
• Contents: the existing ActivityFeedList markup, largely as-is — status dot, text, relative time via LocalTime — with the same empty state. Grouping by day is nice if it falls out cheaply; it isn't the point.
• Only render the trigger when signed in. identity is null for anonymous visitors and there's nothing to show.

Scope

1. Add the trigger in both sidebar.tsx and mobile-nav.tsx as described.

2. Build the sheet around the existing feed markup, extracted from activity-feed.tsx so the list renders identically in its new home.

3. Preserve the per-persona split. The feed already differs by role — getMyRecentActivity for applicants, getRecentApplications for reviewers — and reviewer content must stay inside buildApplicationScopeWhere, so a manager sees only their managed positions' activity. Do not collapse the two into one unscoped query.

4. Remove "Recent activity" from all three dashboards. Move it, don't duplicate it — two copies of one list is worse than today, and removing the card reclaims real dashboard space.

5. Server-rendered, opened client-side. Fetch on the server as the dashboards already do and pass items down through the shell; the sheet is a client leaf owning only open/close. No useEffect fetching.

Relationship to other tickets

• Manager Daily Digest #549 (manager daily digest) — when scoping the email epic, an in-app "new since you were last here" surface was the alternative to a cron-driven digest email. This panel is the beginning of that surface, but without unread state it does not replace a digest: a manager still has no way to learn that something changed without opening the panel and reading it. Revisit Manager Daily Digest #549 once this lands — the gap it fills is "tell me", which this ticket deliberately does not.
• Standardize Lucide Iconography Across The App #572 (iconography) — the trigger icon should come from the shared CONCEPT_ICONS vocabulary.

Non-goals

• No unread state, badge, or mark-as-read. Explicitly deferred.
• No Notification model and no schema change of any kind.
• No /notifications page.
• No push notifications and no email — that's the Email Notifications For Application Events #400 epic.
• No new event types; this surfaces what the app already computes.

Acceptance criteria

• The trigger appears top-right on both desktop and mobile, on every authenticated page.
• It does not render for anonymous visitors.
• The panel opens from the right and does not conflict with the left-side mobile nav drawer.
• An applicant sees their own activity; a manager sees only their managed positions'; an admin sees across published positions.
• "Recent activity" no longer appears on any dashboard.
• Empty state handled, matching the current SectionCardEmpty treatment.
• Keyboard operable with focus trapped in the sheet; verified in both themes at 375px, 768px and 1280px.
• No new database columns or migrations.
• docs/WORKFLOWS.md updated — the dashboard entries (AP-1, PM-1 and the admin equivalent) each describe the Recent activity card.
• npm run prettier:check, eslint:check, tsc:check, test all pass.

Tests

• tests/db/ — the reviewer feed respects position scope; the applicant feed returns only the caller's own activity.