Hello,
I'd like to suggest one recommended way of displaying date/time information on
all pages. We started a discussion in a PR [1] that would change the format
for config reports, please take a look there for possible solutions.
After a discussion with Roxanne (cc) on another page we agreed on following
form to be the best "April 10, 2017 17:08". So no timezone, no seconds, time
is localized in current user timezone. Users can quickly see how long it was
before so we didn't display the "x y ago" information. We could add it to
tooltip if needed.
Once nice thing about this format is that Rails provide helper to generate it.
One could use something like
<%= l(report.last_report_at, :format => :long) %>
which prints "April 10, 2017 17:08". The month name and potentially the format
is localized based on current user locale.
So before I start sending PRs to various places, I'd like to know if we can
all agree on one form, ideally the suggested one, and try to use it where it
make sense. Please vote either in here or in the linked PR.
The list of various places and formats in Foreman and plugins:
-
Core *
reports page - reported at column: "about 1 month ago"
dashboard page: "Generated at 12 Apr 12:41"
facts - reported at columns: "about 1 year ago"
trends page: "Last updated 1 day ago"
audit: "about 1 hour ago" with tooltip saying "April 12, 2017 11:25"
hosts - last report column: 2 months ago
smart proxy - logs - time column: "11. 4. 2017 18:52:31"
smart proxy - puppet ca - ca certificate expiry date: "in almost 4 years" -
Plugins*
discovery - last facts upload: "1 day ago"
openscap reports: "about 1 month ago"
tasks - task details info: "2 minutes ago" with tooltip "2017-04-12 12:49:00
UTC"
rex - jobs: "about 19 hours ago"
rex - logs: "2017-04-11 19:48:09 +0200"
katello - last checking, registered at: "2017-04-12 11:42:06 UTC"
katello - content host tasks: 4/12/17 1:42 PM
Katello would probably need to implement the rails helper (or whatever format
we chose) in their UI helpers. Hopefully that's something easy to do.
[1] https://github.com/theforeman/foreman/pull/4419#issue-217527751
Thanks for reading and sorry for the long email