[Xymon] Column order and accessibility of the 'info' column

[John Thurston]

On 1/17/2014 2:12 AM, henrik at hswn.dk wrote:
> Den 16.01.2014 21:22, John Thurston skrev:
>> We're finding the 'info' column to be very important to us, but are
>> also finding it a little difficult to find in the web displays.
>>
>> Since the number and titles of the columns displayed for each group
>> vary, it is impossible to know which green diamond is the 'info'
>> column without consulting the group-header. Is is difficult in a
>> couple of cases:
>>   + If there are many hosts in a group, it can be hard to do the
>>      row/column matching to click the correct 'info' button.
>>   + If we use the 'find host/jump' function, the found host is
>>      at the top of the page and we must scroll up to find the header.
>>
>> I can think of several ways to make this more usable:
>>   + Use a unique icon (or icon set) for 'info'. Is 'info' ever
>>      be anything but green?
>
> I like the idea of a different icon for the info-column. Try this patch,
> it causes the info-column to use the "unknown.gif" icon which contains a
> question-mark.

Yes, this is helpful, and I have put it on my test instance to try it 
out. The yellow icons on every host are going to cause heartburn for 
some users, though.

I've tried querying the server for hostname.info and get no result. This 
makes me think that the 'info' test is handled differently from other 
tests. If I ask for xymondboard for host=hostname, however, 'info|green' 
is in the response. This makes it look like all other tests. That is a 
little odd.

If the 'info' test will always be 'green', is it possible to define a 
new 'color' of type 'info' for this test?  dotgiffilename could be 
modified to handle the new type and map to an appropriately named gif. 
The state of the test could continue to be stored as 'green' but 
xymongen could translate it to 'info' when it determined it was working 
on INFOCOLUMN

{I should rtfm} As I typed that, I just realized what I'm looking at in 
the patch you supplied for xymongen. There _is_ already an environment 
variable named, INFOCOLUMN.

By setting:
  INFOCOLUMN="-info"
I think I get behavior which meets my needs. The column will sort left, 
and the icon will be green.

Are there limits on what characters can be used in the column name? Do 
you foresee difficulties in your sort, search, or display routines 
caused by leading the column name with a hyphen?
-- 
    Do things because you should, not just because you can.

John Thurston    907-465-8591
John.Thurston at alaska.gov
Enterprise Technology Services
Department of Administration
State of Alaska