Hi folks!

I don't know if you have gotten a chance to check it out yet, but Todd
Sanders has written a reporting app for Spacewalk that lets you store &
manage reports on Spacewalk data  - it's called Telemetry:

https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/PlayPen/Telemetry

I'd like to design a nice web UI for Telemetry. I wanted to show you a
quick conceptual mockup I did and some ideas I put together for how the
UI could be organized. I'd love to hear your feedback / critique / ideas
for how this would/wouldn't work for your usage of Spacewalk. Based on
that feedback I'll draw up a screen flow diagram and hopefully full set
of better mockups (better because they've taken your feedback into
account :) )

So anyhow, here's my mockup:

https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/PlayPen/Telemetry#Design

== USER TASKS ==

The main user tasks here (with some questions for you :) ) are:

- Store Reports
  - Question for you: how long after they are generated would reports
be useful for your organization? a month? a year? After that point would
you prefer to delete them or put them in an archive so they are
out-of-the-way?
  - What's your policy on deleting reports?

- Retrieve reports, in different formats
  - Question for you: how do you send reports to other folks in your
organization? Would you only want them to have access to one or two
particular reports, and not allow them to see others? Would they have
access to your internal network so you'd be giving them an URL to the
Telemetry UI, or would you manage sending them a pdf/txt/csv/etc copy of
the report that you'd download out of Telemetry?

- Schedule reports to run regularly
  - What affects how often you schedule the types of reports you run in
your organization today? Would you mostly run them manually / on-demand
or would you want them to be generated regularly?
  - Would you want to be emailed reports on a regular basis, or emailed
URLs to the reports on a regular basis? How do you typically receive them?

- Create new reports
  - How often do you end up creating new reports? If you had a system
like this for Spacewalk, would you want to create more?

== WALKTHROUGH ==

I wrote up a walkthrough of the ideas behind this mockup in the wiki
page; I'll paste it here too. I'd love to hear your feedback on specific
points:

This mockup is just a brainstorm to try to work out a general
structure/layout, it can completely change. It's more meant to be a
discussion starter. Here is what I started thinking so far by sketching
out the mockup:

* Overview: just little preview widgets to give you a feel for what data
lay in the other screens, with links to jump to the full data sets...
(now that I'm looking at it, each report could have csv / txt / html /
pdf icons next to it to let you download them in one click directly from
the overview page)

* Run a report: a wizard that walks you through running a report; it'll
let you choose which report type you'd like to run, enter in your
username/pass for the report, and schedule the report or let you run it
directly.

* Create a new report: This is probably the part of the ui that reaches
most far and would likely be lower priority / out-of-scope at first.
But, I think if possible:
 o it would be nice to have a wizard that asks you all the questions
that you get asked in the individual report config files and generates a
config file for you.
 o It could have an upload form for the api script. One idea here too
could be a text field for the api script, to write it in the page, and
it could be pre-filled with some stub code and have some kind of basic
API cheatsheet along the bottom with a link to the full API guide.
 o there could be a templates section at the end that shows the various
templates associated with the report and lets you at least view them if
not modify them.

* Report library: a directory showing all the various types of reports,
ideally categorized (not sure how best to handle the categorization),
with maybe a calendar for each report that will let you see which days
of which months that report was generated and will let you click to see
them, as crude as it is i was thinking something like this (but
prettier!):
http://intranet.corp.redhat.com/ic/intranet/RHEL5MeetingMinutes.html
 o maybe by default the calendar for this current month is shown and
you click a link to zoom in on all the monthly calendars for that report
type.

* Report schedule: a schedule-based view of reports, to show you which
reports run on which basis (hourly / daily / weekly / monthly) and to
let you modify the schedules for those reports or stop them from running

* Report templates: similar to the report-library view, but per report
it'll list out what templates are available (html/ pdf/ csv/ etc) and
let you add another template type

In addition to this, reports will probably need two views:

* Report Details view: report type's name, what satellites the report
runs on, (a lot of the .conf file details), a listing of the templates
available for the report, and a full calendar for that report (the
report schedule page would link specifically to that full calendar section)

* Specific report run details: the results from a particular run of that
report, with date/timestamp, user who ran the report, and the report output

This hopefully can be refined and simplified a lot more. Next we need to
draw up a flow diagram for the UI and then based on feedback from the
above and that do some better screen mockups.

Anyhow, again, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, general or
specific. Would something like this for Spacewalk help you?

Thanks,
~m

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