UX Improvements: General UX - Progress/ajax indicators

[Tres Henry]

Related to blueprint: improve-user-experience.

[Tres Henry (tres)]

 This is tied to the ability to create asynchronous table actions which understand when objects are in a transitive state. For example: right now when a user launches an instance the instance goes in to the "build" state almost immediately, however, the instances table never refreshes so it never updates. The idea here would be to show a progress indicator/spinner on any row that is in a transition state and then to poll for updates until all visible objects are in a stable state (in the case of instances this would be state = active).

The correct implementation will extend the functionality in https://github.com/openstack/horizon/blob/master/horizon/horizon/tables/base.py so that a specific table instance can define something like:

poll_states = ('build', 'terminating',)

For a column and the table would just do the right thing.

[Matthew Miller (mattdm)]

I have a UI observation which I think is covered by this report, but I'm a little unclear since the description here is vague.

Currently, the horizon dashboard makes use of spinner.gif to indicte activity in progress. This is _very bad_ from a usability perspective, because since it's just an animated gif, it keeps spinning forever with no relation to backend activity.

Like a progress bar, a spinner has a specific meaning in a user interface — the computer isn't completely hung up, and activity is still proceeding with each click. Of course, it may never end, but the updating image indicates that action is taking place.

Using spinner.gif *looks* the same as this, but it's a lie — the animation is completely decoupled from activity. A brief animation might be okay, but it should *stop* if there's no sign of activity on the back end.

[Gabriel Hurley (gabriel-hurley)]

I'm closing this as wontfix because any further work on connecting to the "progress" of an action in the cloud is tied to https://blueprints.launchpad.net/horizon/+spec/realtime-communication and can be addressed there.