warning triangles: featue review

[oliver-sanders]

Warning triangles were hastily added to the GUI to backfill a functionality gap to Cylc 7. They were implemented in much the same way as they had been previously.

So far the feature seems to have been well received and appears to have been successful in prompting users to tackle warnings (the power of irritation). However, it has also generated a lot of feedback requesting further functionalities and enhancements which is unsurprising.

Before attempting to tackle these one by one, it would be a good idea to step back and review these ideas and the warning triangle feature in general as we might want a larger change / deviation from the status quo than can be achieved with incremental changes.

Dumping user / developer provided suggestions, use cases and ideas here ahead of some form of session on the topic (to make sure this is preserved somewhere more permanent than Ollie's brain cache!).

• Highlighting stalled workflows and the blocked tasks which cause them.
  • An obviously desirable feature!
  • We're already doing this, but these errors are mixed in with less severe events.
  • A shortcut to view the blocked task(s) would help a lot (e.g. open a view filtered for blocked tasks).
  • See also Visual indicator for stalled workflow in sidebar #2312
• Differentiate warnings from errors.
  • E.g warnings make the triangle go orange, whereas errors make it go red.
  • This would help to highlight more severe issues, like blocked tasks.
• Jump to issue.
  • I.e, click on a warning, or something within it (e.g a task) and the GUI will open a view for you to view it in.
  • Not a quick feature to implement, but worth bearing in mind whilst considering warning triangle functionality.
  • Covered by object linking #2215
• Improved events page on the dashboard.
  • Search and filter functionalities.
  • Note there is an (undocumented) idea to introduce Lumino tabbing on the Dashboard page to support more views and more advanced layouts which may be a soft prerequisite to this.
• Allow warnings to be toggled.
  • Like marking an email as unread.
  • I.e, I've seen this, but I haven't resolved it yet.
  • See warning triangles: toggle feature #2280
• Improve warning formatting.
  • It's a little rough at present.
  • Tooltip transparency is not helping here.
  • The ability to open workflow events in a dedicated view might be helpful when there are several of them. This could use the same widget as the improved events section on the dashboard?
• Global state.
  • Currently warning dismissal is a per-session feature (ala Cylc 7).
  • There may be cause to extend this into global state (i.e, dismiss for everyone not just for me).
  • Would require the UIS to preserve state!
• Highlight "new" warnings.
  • When you hover over the icon, you see all warnings.
  • If you dismiss the warnings, a new one comes in, then you hover over the icon again, you can't tell which warnings are new and which are old.
  • See warning triangles: highlight new errors #2315
• Re-consider the 10(?) warning limit.
  • We only keep / display the last N warnings (10 I think).
  • Is this sufficient.
  • If not, how should we pagenate?