UI complaints: Why are resources, groups, tables, etc. never sorted?

[genman]

RHQ (4.4 incl.) always displays, say, resources in the order they were created--perhaps by ID. So when viewing any table, I have to then click on the 'sort by name' column. Which is sort of pointless since the UI really should just sort by default by name, but I supposed ideally the order should be configurable or retained.

I've also noticed sorting by ancestor resource name doesn't really work either. I'm guessing it's sorting by ancestor ID not the ancestor string itself. So if I'm checking if a resource exists in a pool of servers, and sort by the server name (which look like 'server001' 'server002', etc.) I can't really tell if one of the servers is missing from the list since sometimes 1-10 are shown with 5 showing up after 8 or something.

I have a fairly large installation with 500+ servers, so compared to most other users these nagivation issues aren't much of a problem.

Also, somewhat related to this is the column widths are fairly arbitrary. Some wide columns have a little bit of text and don't wrap, while some narrow columns have a lot of text and wrap all the time. For example, the Platform list has a completely empty (and useless) wide "Ancestor" column, yet the Version column is narrow and can't hold the name of the Linux version which is long. Better defaults for this would help.

Maybe this is in the roadmap and I missed it. Anyway, any comments appreciated.

[jayshaughnessy]

Hi Elias,

Good question, weak answer...  I think it's mainly due to the SmartGWT GUI being realtively new and that level of review not yet being prioritized.  The sorting needs to be set pretty much view by view, and there are a lot of views.  Also, your suspicion that sorting on certain fields, like ancestry, is correct.  It is made mode difficult in that the underlying value is encoded.  So, sorting on that column would be limited to client-side only (i.e. only the data fetched ths far) and can not be performed in the actual query.

I agree that there should be better defaults, typically 'name'.  Also, as you point out, sorting choices are not yet persisted for a user.  This would be a good RFE.  And yes, column widths are pre-set and not always perfectly.  Columns are not "shrink to fit" for technical reasons, but rather fixed-width.  Again, persisting preferred widths for a user could be useful.

My only recommendation would be to fomalize specific requests as Bugzilla entries so they can get prioritized.  Of course, if you feel the desire to submit patches for your most annoying views that would be great.

[jayshaughnessy]

Elias,

After discussing this I was annoyed enough to actually create https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=846375 and at least fix a few glaring issues with the resource list views.  I've pushed this for RHQ 4.5...  Feel free to file further BZ's for your related requests.

Jay

[genman]

Jay,

Thanks for adding this minor but important feature. I will probably file some bugs once I get to try and deploy RHQ 4.5.

[genman]

I created https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=850976 for suggesting that alert, metric, and drift templates should appear sorted.

I haven't tested your fix above but are groups also now sorted? That is probably the other big one. I have about 30+ groups and they all appear unsorted.