Support image versions / large numbers of images

[justinsb]

When we have multiple image versions (for example, a daily debian wheezy image, or a periodically refreshed Jenkins image), we want to keep them all around in Glance in case users want to launch a specific version. But the typical user will only want to launch the latest image.

The horizon UI doesn't seem very well attuned to having more than a handful of images. As far as I can tell, every image is displayed in the "launch-server" drop-down, and only the image name is shown, so everything must be encoded in the name. For a large number of images, a drop-down doesn't really scale.

On the image page, maybe we should hide "obsolete" images by default. It would also be nice if there was a search box, so you could type a few characters to narrow the image list.

How do people cope with large numbers of images?

[Victoria Martinez de la Cruz (vkmc)]

I agree that for a great amount of images the current layout is a bit uncomfortable.

The changes you suggested sound good to me. Maybe we could implement those like the following:

- For the launch instance modal, it could be possible to add an extra tab dedicated to images in which images are ordered by creation date (more recent at the top) and also add a search form in case the user wants to look for an specific image.

- For the images and snapshots page add the same features.

And what do you mean with "obsolete"? Images with old creation date? If so, in the suggested layout those would be last in the table, and if there is more than one page, in the last page.

Maybe an UX designer could give us better ideas.

[justinsb (justin-fathomdb)]

Great ideas.

By "obsolete" I mean images that have a newer version e.g. imagine a daily updated Ubuntu image. I can't imagine many people would want to launch yesterday's image from the UI. But an automated tool might well lock on a particular image id, which is periodically updated after testing, so we can't delete the image from Glance. Hence I was suggesting we just hide them by default in the UI. Sorting by date would definitely help, but it's also not the most intuitive presentation.

Maybe we could borrow from Google Flights / Hipmunk, which hides flight choices when they are worse options (longer or more expensive). For images with the same name, we would only show the newest version by default.

[Gabriel Hurley (gabriel-hurley)]

Love the idea, it probably deserves a blueprint all on it's own, but I'll keep the ticket for now so we don't lose track of it.

[Nikunj Aggarwal (nikunj2512)]

Hi,

I am working on this issue and i almost implemented this functionality. So, will i submit the code for review or first i submit this as a blueprint as Gabriel has suggested??

[Julie Pichon (jpichon)]

This looks like a large undertaking, I'd recommend opening the blueprint and referencing both the bug number and blueprint in the commit message.

[Nikunj Aggarwal (nikunj2512)]

Thank You Julie. I will do the same.

[Akihiro Motoki (amotoki)]

In the Angular launch instance form, we now supports filtering with name and sort images by "Updated time", so I think we already supports what is requested in the bug report.

There is no standard way to mark images as "Obsolete". I think you can do it by filtering images by name and sort them in the order of updated time.

I mark this bug as Incomplete. If there are more, feel free to add idea to this bug and change the status to New.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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