Hi Jason,

We discussed this in #spacewalk-devel yesterday but I also
wanted to provide a quick summary for reference and for the
benefit of folks who didn't happen to be in IRC at the time. ;-)

Jason Dobies wrote:
> As a quick summary, I want a way to submit a SSM request and be able to
> track it by going back to a page of all of these operations rather than
> sit on a blank page waiting for it to complete.
> 
> I added a new tab to the SSM tab bar called Operations with two subtabs:
> In Progress and All. Clicking on an operation description in either of
> these views brings up a details page that shows some more information
> about the operation itself along with a list of all servers that were in
> the SSM at the time the operation was submitted.
> 
> The links on the server names lead to that server's event history tab so
> the user can quickly see the status of the request on that particular
> server (assuming the operation resulted in a server event).
> 
> I've attached screenshots to show what this looks like in the UI.
> 
> I'm sending this out for two reasons:
> 1.) General input on the UI

Short-Term:

1 - In the short-term, I think that 'Operations' should be
renamed 'Status'.

2- I also think that rather than being a context/in-page
tab, it should be an item in the navigation under Systems >
SSM. (The navigation in the screenshots should be Systems >
SSM so there's something funky going on there right now
since it says Overview.) The rationale for this is (a) there
are quite a lot of context tabs in the SSM pages already,
there isn't really room for another, (b) all of the other
tabs are action classes (kickstart, config, channels, etc.)
so the 'operations' tab in comparison sticks out like a
goose in a circle of ducks. :)

3 - The Systems > SSM > Overview screen could be
reformulated such that the task menu could be half-width,
and you could have two or three widget panes (similar to the
'Overview' panes you see upon login) to give you a preview
of the data in the 'Status' tab to draw users into it. For
example, you could have an 'Failed' status widget and an 'In
Progress' status widget to each show the most recently
failed / most recently in-progress async SSM tasks.

Long-Term:

1 - An asynchronous task management system is useful beyond
the SSM so it would be good to make it a bit more generic.

2 - Rather than have this be an item in the SSM nav, this
data really belongs under the main/top-level Schedule tab.
However, it would then be more appropriate to rename the
'Schedule' tab to be the 'Tasks' tab. Right now the Schedule
tab stores completed / failed / in progress / and
scheduled/queued actions to take place on clients. There
isn't any reason though that we couldn't overload it to
handle stuff that's Satellite-side like channel and system
deletions. The Schedule tab does need some UI love, but we
did have an intern perform some usability testing on it a
while back so we have some good ideas on what needs to be
fixed already.



Let me know if I got any points in this summary wrong or
confused.

Overall, I'm really happy that you've taken a look at this
Jason and started the process of getting Spacewalk to handle
long-running tasks better. It's one of those things that
always bothered me so I'm glad it's getting love now. :)

~m

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