RFC: Drop the search on the dashboard

Development
1

Hello,

how useful is the search on the dashboard page?

It looks like our plugin API does not allow to use filtering (search), so no plugins providing widgets can use that and they currently show irrelevant data when search is used. I think the search bar is one of the features which come from the past - when Foreman was just a puppet inventory software. It made sense back than, dashboard was just all puppet. Dashbaord is now used by many other features and the searching does not work for any of these widgets.

Another problem is that the search box only works for hosts, while hosts are at the center of everything Foreman do, it’s not relevant for some widgets (e.g. discovered hosts are not regular hosts, searching will not work for them).

Finally, if you have many widgets on dashboard, it is pretty database heavy. I’ve proposed to implement Rails caching in the past but one of the reasons why this was not merged was the search.

I propose to remove search box from dashboard. That does not mean that widgets must not offer any kind of interactivity - there can be active elements that would further limit search scope or even a search query for those widgets which are relevant. They would need to be implemented per-widget.

2 Likes
2

Personally I don’t recall ever using search on the dashboard. What I think is that the specific list pages should implement this. I think the task list already has some statistics and that’s generally a more appropriate place.

1 Like
3

+1 for dropping it,
Oh you didn’t talk about the whole dashboard page?
This page truly needs refactoring.

As for the search I don’t see it in use, unless it’s used to find a hidden widget quickly? If someone wants to search about some widget data, the widget should be implemented with search inside of it.

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Yeah, I forgot that it ever existed until I was digging in the code with @adiabramovitch today.

If there is a demand to drill down for any data, it’s a good use case and we should probably implement a new widget (e.g. breakdown of some data).

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Yeah my proposal is to not to introduce the search bar when we get to reimplementing it in the new JS stack.

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@MariSvirik any ideas for a cool new dashboard design? :slight_smile:

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I could think of something. :smiley:
(some pf4 patterns for dashboards)
But let’s consult with PMs and set the priorities for the future.

1 Like