Disambiguation changes for RHQ4

Lukas Krejci lkrejci at redhat.com
Tue Mar 8 10:10:16 UTC 2011


On Monday, March 07, 2011 19:50:36 Jay Shaughnessy wrote:
> On 3/7/2011 11:49 AM, Charles Crouch wrote:
> > Looks good. Some thoughts/questions...
> > 
> > 1)So an example value in a resource_ancestry column for a Datasource
> > resource could be?:
> > 
> > 10100_:_10101_:_JBoss EAP_::_10010_:_10011_:_mylaptop.test.com
> 
> That looks feasible.
> 
> > 2) Plugins can't change existing resource names after resource creation
> > right, even after an upgrade? So that shouldn't be a problem
> > 
> > 3) I know it will be take some crazy set of circumstances to hit the 4k
> > limit, but can we make sure that if we do hit the limit, that we just
> > stop writing at the highest complete ancestry level, and don't end up
> > with "....10100_:_101"
> 
> alright, I'll add that check.
> 
> > 4) Will this new approach make any changes from RHQ3 in how the displayed
> > resource's names actually look? IIRC the displayed resource names change
> > right now based on what other resources are in the list, we basically do
> > just enough to ensure uniqueness? i.e. we don't show the full resource
> > hierarchy for every resource in every list view. Will this remain the
> > same?
> 
> No, the approach is different. At least initially.  In RHQ3 we typically
> saw a "Resource" column.  The value in that column was different
> depending on the resources in the list. The resource name was always
> shown.  The type name was added when multiple resources for the same
> type were present.  

multiple resources of the same name

> The plugin name was added to that if the type name
> could come from multiple plugins.  Perhaps more was done, I'm not sure.
> Additionally, the "Location" column contained ancestry information and
> also could have varying detail.
> 
> In my opinion the RHQ3 approach has some drawbacks.  The varying detail
> in the "Resource" and "Location" columns is visually disorienting and
> somewhat hard to understand.  Also, It can be quite verbose in the
> column layout.
> 
> In RHQ4, at least initially, we've gone back to having a simple "Name"
> column with the resource name wrapped in a navigable link.  The
> "Location" field is now "Ancestry" and shows the parental ancestry, by
> resource name, also wrapped in links.  Furthermore, we're integrating
> hover in various ways.  In the inventory lists you can hover over the
> "Ancestry" value and also see the parental *Type* ancestry.
> 

One of the goals of the original disambiguation was for the user to be able to 
distinguish between the 5 "localhost" resources in the result lists at a 
glance.
For example apache, postfix, samba, jboss-as(5) and maybe even others can be 
called "localhost:port" and have the same ancestry (i.e. the platform they're 
installed on). The user will only be able to distinguish these on hover unless 
they remember what port each of them is available on, which I am not sure is 
ideal.

Yes, in RHQ3 the contents of the column could vary in the level of detail but 
each element of that "detail" had slightly different visuals (type and plugin 
names in italic, resource name in bold with a link) to "guide" the eyes.

I'm not saying that that is better than what you propose, I'm just trying to 
put the two approaches next to each other so that we can pick and choose the 
good things from either.

> This is where things stand right now, four days in.  Having said the
> above, taking the RHQ3 approach, or maybe something in between, is
> probably doable (paging maybe a problem?).  Given a result set of
> resources it's possible to process things in various ways, client-side
> for GWT.
> 
> Although not done yet, we'll need to provide the CLI with some utility
> to decode the ancestry values.
> 

Also we're going to need some utility in the server code itself so that 
serverside plugins can use this. Alert::Email I think can insert the ancestry 
info in the emails.

> > Thanks very much
> > Charles
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > 
> >> The proposed changes for disambiguation in RHQ4 have an initial design
> >> section in the following wiki page:
> >> 
> >> 
> >> http://www.rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Disambiguation+API#Disambiguation
> >> API-RHQ4Changes
> >> 
> >> Please review and question. Thanks,
> >> 
> >> Jay
> >> 
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> > 
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