Difference between revisions of "Hudson-ci/Planning/SidebarSizing"

Revision as of 05:28, 23 August 2013

	The Hudson Planning Page

This is a UI project sparked by Issue 404075 - Hudson wraps content in Build Queue and Build Executor Status.

The Issue

The Hudson UI sidebar is used to provide, amongst other things, lists of build history, executor status and so on. The issue raised is that formatting issues can occur if Job names in particular are too long, un that case we will either get wrapping within the job name or in some cases size increase in the width of the sidebar that can disrupt other elements of the UI

Examples

This example shows the current wrapping of a long job name on the build executor status:

This example shows the problem of plug-ins extending the width of the sidebar in the case of Build History.

Information

Work relating to this project will be tagged on the whiteboard in bugzilla with: hudson-ui-polish

Options

To address this issue as reported we can take several approaches

1. (Mostly) Do nothing - i.e. leave the current wrapping behavior and in fact ensure that this same wrapping behavior is used consistently (e.g. in Build-history)
2. Dumb Truncate - We truncate the long job name with ellipses
3. Smart Truncate - We truncate some of the central portion of the job name leaving both leading and trailing information in the name
4. Define shortname for a job
5. Configurable Sidebar Width - We leave the current wrapping behavior but provide a configuration parameter to allow Admins to increase the width of the sidebar to suit their content and plugin configurations

Discussion

Option 1

• Low cost and we've only had one direct request for this clean up - DuncanMills

Option 2

• In the case of more complex jobs important information can be present at the end of thr Job name string, so a dumb truncate will cause loss of information (although it would be available in a tool tip).  On the positive side this is a low cost change. - DuncanMills

Option 3

• Smart truncate would allow us to retain the bits of the job name that convey information. However, selecting which characters of the name are important is totally dependent on the standards used by the site and of course would vary from project to project in some cases.  So we'd need a pattern mask both at the site and the job level. This would require model changes and prefence screen changes. - DuncanMills

Option 4

• Short name, like smart tuncate, would require model and config changes but would be simpler to implement and perhaps actually more satisfactory. - DuncanMills

Option 5

• Configuarable widths would probably only work in terms of setting a minimum width rather than an absolute width, otherwise there is too much danger of hitting layout problems with plugins  - DuncanMills

Decision