Job configuration page navigation with Tabs - Jenkins 2.0

[Tom Fennelly]

I've been working on the Job configuration pages a bit, trying to make them easier to use. The goals I have for this are:

1. NOT break form submission.
2. NOT break plugin backward compatibility.
3. Improve usability by visually breaking up long configurations, hopefully making it easier to quickly see the sections and navigate between them (Vs scrolling etc).
4. Provide other usability tweaks where possible, but without breaking anything.
5. Make things optional, allowing people to easily switch back to the "classic" Job config view.

I've been labeling the work done so far as "phase 1" because I know this effort might need to go through a few iterations before we get it right. 

Some resources:

• The JIRA: JENKINS-32357.
  
• A demo video: https://youtu.be/uOiclX_W37Q
• A temporary PR on which to view the changes: https://github.com/tfennelly/jenkins/pull/1 . Please comment here though. I will be closing that PR.

Please note that this is a WiP. It's still a bit of an experiment and we want to know what people think of it i.e. do people believe this is an improvement worth pursuing more and adding to Jenkins 2.0 etc.

[Robert Sandell]

I think that a little bit of breakage in the ui or form submission for plugins using some exotic thing is ok for the greater good.

We have an opportunity here to redeem old sins and clean up technical debt in the ui and we should take it.

So yes we should tread carefully, but not too much ;)

The changes you showed in the video is in my mind not worthy of a 2.0 label but could have been done in a weekly.

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Robert Sandell

Software Engineer

CloudBees Inc.

[Tom Fennelly]

On 22 January 2016 at 10:57, Robert Sandell <rsan...@cloudbees.com> wrote:

The changes you showed in the video is in my mind not worthy of a 2.0 label but could have been done in a weekly.

Ok, so reading between the lines here, it sounds like you are saying that you believe a change worthy of a 2.0 label needs to be a change that can't be made in 1.x i.e. a breaking change. To the best of my knowledge, that is not what 2.0 is about, but does sound like 3.0.

Anyway ... 1.x, 2.x, 3.x debates aside... I did say this was still a WiP, but it sounds like it's not something that tickles your fancy, which is fine ... this is what we're trying to find out ... are people for or against it.

[Stephen Connolly]

I really like this change... I also suspect that it would be fine in a weekly... but if you want to save it for 2.0 that's your call!

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[Tom Fennelly]

It would of course be possible to put this into 1.x (anything is possible), but it would need to be reworked to use prototypejs etc (yeuk). At the moment, it builds on top of the newer JavaScript building blocks that are hopefully going in with the new Install Wizard (PR #1995). Doing it the older "1.x way" would change it into a much uglier beast (from an impl pov).

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[Tom Fennelly]

Sorry ... something that was not clear/obvious in my last post ... the new Install Wizard (PR #1995) is also targeted for 2.0.

[Stephen Connolly]

Fair 'nuff

On 22 January 2016 at 12:50, Tom Fennelly <tom.fe...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Robert Sandell]

I was more concerned about that you mentioned you were doing this as an effort to make sure you really didn't break anything and that put constraints on what you can do.

And I wanted to encourage you to "loosen up" and not feel so constrained ;) Go wild man, I believe in you! :D

I was confused as well as it was quite far from the demo that you and Gus had done previously on JUC. It didn't really comply, to me, with the UI changes theme that was previously presented in the 2.0 presentations.

/B

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[Surya Gaddipati]

Great Stuff Tom. 

I was worried about loosing cmd+f but there is a find box. 

One suggestion I have would be to auto complete the find box so user doesn't have to look through what is highlighted.

Surya

[Tom Fennelly]

The kind of thing that was shown at JUC may still be possible, but if we can, I think it would be much better to get there without breaking plugins etc all over the place (as would be the case if we took the same approach as used for the JUC demo) and me making enemies within the community. The longterm effects of that, apart from the pain and wasted time of being in an endless loop of fixing plugins and other irritating side effects, would be that people would be totally against any other efforts at improving aspects of usability within Jenkins (+ I'd never be able to show my face at JUC etc again - persona non grata). That would be really bad and sad imo !!

So in this specific case, I'm trying to follow a path that will allow us improve the config page UX a bit at a time AND without there being large collateral damage. I'm hoping people can see the longterm goal here and not be expecting some sort of overnight "KFC to Michelin Star" transformation. Continuing the corny food metaphors ... I think we need to "eat" this problem a bit at a time and this is why I have a "phase 1" label on JENKINS-32357.

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[Tom Fennelly]

Thanks Surya.

I'll add finder auto-complete to the list of features to try add.

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[Tom Fennelly]

I added a JIRA for phase 2 (and beyond).

[Robert Sandell]

Looks good Tom! Thanks for explaining.

I'd like two Big Macs, a large bucket of wings and a diet coke please ;)

/B

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[Tom Fennelly]

There's a proper PR now: #2006, so there should be a runnable build soon.

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[Tom Fennelly]

It would be great if one or more people could get the PR builder build from https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/2006, take it for a spin and let us know if they encounter any issues. Thanks.

[Antonio Muñiz]

Tested:

 1. Install wizard with recommended plugins

 2. Install wizard with custom plugins configuration (I miss lots of plugins in the list - but I think there is a process to decide what to include there (?))

 3. Tabbed configuration page in jobs

BTW loving the look and feel of the install wizard and the search bar in job config page! Nice!

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 9:37 PM, Tom Fennelly <tom.fe...@gmail.com> wrote:

It would be great if one or more people could get the PR builder build from https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/2006, take it for a spin and let us know if they encounter any issues. Thanks.

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Antonio Muñiz

Software Engineer
CloudBees, Inc.

[Tom Fennelly]

Thanks Antonio.

Daniel merged these changes to the 2.0 branch. There's a build available at https://jenkins.ci.cloudbees.com/job/core/job/jenkins-core/3924/ if others want to test it out (especially those running on Windows ... IE etc).

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