[Xymon] Making COMPACT: work

[J.C. Cleaver]

On Wed, June 17, 2015 8:17 am, Root, Paul T wrote:
> I didn't know compact existed.  I gave it a try, and it did compact it
> down, but if I click on the column, I just get "status not available".
>
> That's not useful.
>


COMPACT is intended more for page display alteration purposes than test
combining. To get a clickable dot, you'd want to use combostatus and
combo.cfg, which allows for a more logical combination options, albeit in
a slightly awkward syntax.

It would be useful to combine the two aspects of this somewhat into a
unified syntax. It could still be handled on by the generators and
parsers, with xymongen and svcstatus.cgi doing the calculation work "live"
at display time (like COMPACT), or instead by a "combo.cfg"-aware status
(or stachg) channel listener which re-injects the results of combo
calculations as warranted, or by xymond itself. Each has pluses and
minuses.





> From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Scott, Brian
> Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 12:03 AM
> To: xymon at xymon.com
> Subject: [Xymon] Making COMPACT: work
>
> After years of wanting to use COMPACT: in hosts.cfg but never getting it
> to work, I finally decided to have a closer look.
>
> It turns out there are a few small problems that need attention. In
> particular, the documentation is wrong about delimiters. If you use the
> syntax shown in the man page then it will crash (or not depending on some
> undocumented behaviour with strlen and NULL input).
>
> The correct format is actually:
>
> COMPACT:newfield=oldfield1|oldfield2|oldfield3,anothernewfield=oldfield4|oldfield5
>
> Etc.
>
> These patches correct the manpage, make the software more robust against
> crashes when you try the bad syntax, and fix a problem with clicking on
> the summary icon.
>


Thanks for these. I'd actually been meaning to apply the patch from last
week relating to COMPACT, but was initially stymied by some of the same
issues and hadn't had a chance to dig deeper.

I'll apply these in soon.


Regards,

-jc