[katello-devel] Custom Values as more of a plugin model

[Ohad Levy]

On 08/07/2012 06:43 PM, Adam Price wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Bryan Kearney" <bkearney at redhat.com>
>> To: katello-devel at redhat.com, "Adam Price" <adprice at redhat.com>
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 7, 2012 10:58:33 AM
>> Subject: Custom Values as more of a plugin model
>>
>> Adam:
>>
>> Ohad was commenting that he is interested in a re-usable bit of ruby
>> functionality (gem, engine, dunno) which would allow folks to to
>> extend
>> a rails app on site. It sounded like custom values may be in line
>> with
>> that idea. Perhaps you could hook up and see if it makes sense to
>> combine the ideas?
>
> Ohad, what functionality are wanting to be re-usable? it sounds like you're wanting to make something that is modular enough to be detachable from any part of katello and then attached onto something else. That does sound in-line with custom value attaching to subscriptions, systems, or what ever else. I'm trying to think of how this would be done.
>
> With the custom values for a system, we were first thinking of having candlepin store the values, but if we'd like to do something more modular, then perhaps katello should retain the custom information and then inject it whenever an object with custom information is requested. Something along the lines of a decorator when we're grabbing data.
>
> thoughts? katello-devel, what say you?

Ideally, it should be a collection of the following elements:

1. be able to add new MCV's
2. be able to extend attributes of existing MVC
3. be able to add more routes, db migrations, etc.

all of the above is supported afaik using rails engine (might be better 
supported under rails 3.1, but thats another discussion), excluding 
option #2 for view.

In order to allow users to extend the existing view, we would need to 
come up with UI hooks, where people could inject stuff (e.g. like 
additional tab, additional dropdown etc).

I think that redmine has such a system and its worth exploring how they 
implemented that.

Ohad

>
>
>>
>> For everyone else, for Headpin we are interested in getting custom
>> values which can be added to certain objects (e.g A PO # to a
>> subscription, or an asset tag to a system). We know we will get
>> requests
>> to brand katello and add custom pages, so perhaps we can combine them
>> into one effort.
>>
>> -a- bk
>>
>