Using dashboards outside RTC web environment
I manage/administer a dozen or so RTC projects and like to keep tabs on how they are doing in a general sense (e.g. Server Status). Yesterday I discovered I can add cross-server viewlets to a dashboard (after setting up cross-server ). So, I added Server Status viewlet to a page on my personal dashboard, but it's cumbersome as I must login to each of the repositories to display what's exposed.
It would be awesome to use this idea to create a "view" so that I could show all the servers (whether capable of cross-server or not) could be shown and login would be handled. I think I could conquer the login, but not really certain how I would reference particular viewlets. I've been trying to gather that bit from lots of searching, but have yet to stumble upon it. |
2 answers
Hi Kevin,
I agree this would be useful, as I can imagine logging in a dozen times is painful. Right now it's using OAuth to authenticate, because the viewlet fetches its data via a proxy on the local server serving the dashboard, which means that you have to grant the proxy authority to make requests to the other servers on your behalf. This is relatively secure because the local server doesn't know your password - the password you enter is on the remote server - the proxy only has a special token that grants it temporary access to the remote data. The reason we don't have a "keep me logged in" option is because it's not secure. You would basically be giving a server full access to your account permanently. The only way I can imagine supporting this use case is to provide the option to relax security in special cases like this. For example, the oauth token could be authorized to allow permanent access to this specific data. As far as automatically logging in and hosting a viewlet from some other page that aggregates all the viewlets from the different servers, this would be quite involved. The Web UI is heavily javascript-oriented and relies on a lot of plumbing to bring all the pieces together. Unfortunately you can't just pop a viewlet in an iframe, because it needs to load the whole Web UI environment and all the javascript dependencies, which requies an Eclipse/OSGi environment. It's not to say it's not possible, just difficult. I've created a work item to track this use case: https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/105590 |
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Thanks for the reply. I'll add my ID as a subscriber to the item.
My idea was to not use the OAuth and have a "driver" that could be configured with list of repositories and could gather this information during a session and display. I already have a tool that helps me with ID work that will iterate my configured repositories and return all the configured projects and their names (from project ID's stored in its back end db) I was hoping for a light-weight means of making the server status available amongst that sort of environment. Hi Kevin, |
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