[rabbitmq-discuss] Management Plugin Additions

Tue Mar 22 10:52:31 GMT 2011

Hi Gavin.

On 21/03/11 22:10, Gavin M. Roy wrote:
> I am looking at a project where we would like to append operational
> data to the Management Plugin user interface that would allow our
> teams to have a consolidated view of our cluster and consumer status.
> The plan is just to append a JavaScript include that would append
> what is needed to the user interface.
>
> Examples of use might be active consumer locations or a note about a
> queue that could impact what someone may do when it starts to back
> up.
>
> The initial thought is to allow for a new "priv/www" directory to be
> specified in rabbitmq.config, where I can extend the existing
> templates including our 1 javascript file which would append the
> functionality we would like to the UI.

This is quite interesting, because I've been having somewhat similar 
thoughts about extending the management UI. rabbitmq-shovel already 
holds some status information that it would be useful to see, and the 
upcoming rabbitmq-federation probably will too. Other plugins might have 
similar needs.

I think my case is a superset of yours though; I need to be able to 
extend the HTTP API (probably by plugging modules into the webmachine 
dispatch table) as well as plugging into the Javascript.

Of course, I haven't actually *done* anything yet.

> Is there a better way to handle this? All we really want is to just
> append the one external JavaScript include.
>
> Alternatively, the easiest implementation is to download the
> appropriate plugin version from the repo, change the HTML, recompile
> and distribute. However this adds a bit of overhead with each new
> RabbitMQ upgrade that could be avoided with such a configuration
> variable.

Hmm, I suspect that may be the best approach in the short term.

> If we create such a patch, would it be considered for inclusion so we
> don't have to maintain our own version of the plugin?

Probably not, as it's likely to get trampled by what I'm planning to do 
I'm afraid.

Cheers, Simon

-- 
Simon MacMullen
Staff Engineer, RabbitMQ
SpringSource, a division of VMware