Write a gui/wizard to make creating new templates easier

[Angus Salkeld]

could be a horizon plugin

[Tim Schnell (tim-schnell)]

Unless anyone else has started work on this. I'm going to start ramping up my contributions to the UI-side of Heat. I would like to get some ideas together on this and present them to the community.

[Steve Baker (steve-stevebaker)]

Good to hear Tim.

You might want to get in contact with Liz Blanchard <email address hidden> as she has been looking at this from a UX point of view.

[Tim Schnell (tim-schnell)]

Thanks Steve,

I tried to contact her but it looks like I might have the wrong email address. I'll send a message to this email.

[Liz Blanchard (lblanchard)]

Hey all,

Thanks for looping me into this conversation. I haven't made any updates to my wireframes since summit due to getting pulled onto another project, but I'm happy to share what I put together. Hopefully it can drive more discussion among the team when it comes to having a wizard for creating templates.

I've attached the PDF version of the wireframes. Some things to note that I took away from reviewing these at Summit with the team:

1) We should allow for simple template creation.
          -CRUD.
          -Possibly allow for sharing, exporting, importing, versioning?

2) We should focus more on orchestration - less manual user steps, more reliance on services behind (Heat). Provide user with the option of the final goal of certain deployments rather than making them do all of the manual steps. (The example I like to use here is comparing an Old remote control vs. newer remote control which let's you push "Watch TV" rather than having to tell it to switch to a certain input.)

Please feel free to contact me further with any questions. Even though I'm not actively working on these currently, I'm happy to give my thoughts and review anything that's being done :)

Liz

[Tim Schnell (tim-schnell)]

Hi Liz,

Thanks for sharing your wireframes, they really help me visualize what a template creator should look like. One of the things that my team has prioritized as important is a visual topology of an existing stack. Which seems to tie in nicely with a template creator, a first pass at it would essentially be the same process as importing an existing template to work from instead of starting from scratch.

I'm planning on starting a blueprint soon for building the stack topology graph but I think it and the template creator should be dependent on the same UI engine for consistency and so we don't duplicate work. I know that I will probably be the only one working on it initially but I will be sure to keep you in the loop so we can review things together. :)

Thanks!
Tim

[Nikunj Aggarwal (nikunj2512)]

Hi all,

We have already submitted a blueprint in the horizon for this issue.

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/horizon/+spec/stack-designer-ui

Please go ahead and take a look and give your comments, if you have any.

We also want to start work in on the stack designer as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Nikunj