The ISO just runs "buildiso" with the default parameters. If someone
would like to make an intermediate page for it where we can enter more
parameters (and needs this) let me know, though I didn't find it to be
something we really needed immediately -- the goal of the web app being
to be simpler and easier to use. I thought about doing the thing that
allows you to choose which profiles to include, but if we did the same
for systems it would be very hard to do for very large cobbler install
bases in any sort of sane way. We might decide to allow people to
choose what profiles and not systems? I am not sure.
Anyway, when cobbler finishes the ISO you not only get the "task done"
event but also an event with the link to download it.
The ISO pops out at /var/www/cobbler/pub/generated.iso, so it can be
downloaded by remote computers.
Cobbler check data is now visible in the web app as well.
I also sorted the settings display at the same time, though settings
currently remain not user-editable (which was done originally to keep
someone from breaking
cobblerd in a way that could not be fixed via the web app).
As I've done this, it becomes clear the menus are a little crowded now,
so things like the event log, tasks, settings, etc can also be cleaned
up I imagine by just making icons (with tooltips, of course) instead of
text.
We could probably also do this for some of the actions, leaving room for
the "filter/pager" settings on the list page to show up when we need to.
I think this basically finishes the functional things I really wanted to
do for the backend functionality of the web app, so I would appreciate
review/comments. I think there is still room for lots of things in
terms of usability, such as expanding/collapsing sections of fields to
not overwhelm users -- I think that would be a good thing, especially on
the systems page. I think we could probably be even more clever and
just do tabs for each property "type" ... which could eliminate vertical
scrolling altogether and make us look a little less like a web page from
1998 :)
If anyone has good CSS/web-development skills and also wants to do
little stuff like help with icons, layout, fonts, whatever... I'm
generally open to all sorts of improvements and would appreciate the help.
(OT: I still have the idea that a link to see how the objects are
associated to one another (and be able to click on them to launch the
edit pages) would be /really/ cool, not entirely sure how best to do it,
but I want to do this very much -- plus I like graphics/visualization
stuff in general :) ... ).
--Michael