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Make device description a clickable link #15981

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llamafilm opened this issue May 6, 2024 · 4 comments
Open

Make device description a clickable link #15981

llamafilm opened this issue May 6, 2024 · 4 comments
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complexity: low Requires minimal effort to implement status: under review Further discussion is needed to determine this issue's scope and/or implementation topic: UI/UX User interface or user experience related work type: feature Introduction of new functionality to the application

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@llamafilm
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NetBox version

v3.7.3

Feature type

Change to existing functionality

Proposed functionality

When viewing the /dcim/devices webpage, I would like an option to make the Description field a hyperlink to the device page, just like the ID and Name columns behave now.

Implementation details are open for discussion. It could be always on, or a configuration.py parameter, or a user preference.

Use case

We don't use the Name field at all because the uniqueness constraints don't work for our use case. All of our devices are "unnamed", so I like to hide that column while browsing the UI. For now, I'm keeping the ID column visible so I can click the link to the device. I would prefer to hide that column and click on the Description instead, because the ID number is meaningless for most users, and it's also requires more mouse precision to click the smaller link area.

Current view:
image

Desired change:
image

This might be an edge case, but it would help a lot for usability in our situation and I hope it would be trivial to implement.

Database changes

No response

External dependencies

none
@llamafilm llamafilm added status: needs triage This issue is awaiting triage by a maintainer type: feature Introduction of new functionality to the application labels May 6, 2024
@jeffgdotorg jeffgdotorg removed their assignment May 7, 2024
@jeffgdotorg jeffgdotorg added status: needs owner This issue is tentatively accepted pending a volunteer committed to its implementation topic: UI/UX User interface or user experience related work and removed status: needs triage This issue is awaiting triage by a maintainer labels May 7, 2024
@jeffgdotorg
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Good FR, thanks for writing it up.

@Julio-Oliveira-Encora
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Could you please assign it to me?

@jeremystretch jeremystretch added status: accepted This issue has been accepted for implementation and removed status: needs owner This issue is tentatively accepted pending a volunteer committed to its implementation labels May 7, 2024
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@jeremystretch
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I'm afraid the proposed change isn't tenable, for two reasons.

First, the description field is not intended to be used in this manner: It is meant to capture a brief bit of free-form text, and linking this text in most cases would be unnatural and confusing.

Second, most objects in NetBox have a description field, and linkifying only this one would be inconsistent with the others.

Maybe you could expand on why you're not using the name field for devices?

@llamafilm
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Our devices do not have unique names. For example, at one site I might have 100 devices called “AVR”. Within the context of a room (Location), this makes sense and is the easiest way for our technicians to refer to a device. When I need a unique identifier, I use the Device ID.

When I first started using Netbox, I tried to think of a naming convention to ensure uniqueness, but the only way to do that is to append information that’s already present in other fields, which makes it harder to read and more prone to mistakes. So I used the Description field as a “human friendly” label in the Netbox UI and as a label in Prometheus/Grafana, which is fed by Netbox.
Then I realized it’s possible to leave all devices unnamed which works great, except for this issue.

Another option is to relax the requirement for unique names per site, but I think that has already been shot down before.

@jeremystretch jeremystretch added status: under review Further discussion is needed to determine this issue's scope and/or implementation complexity: low Requires minimal effort to implement and removed status: accepted This issue has been accepted for implementation labels May 21, 2024
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complexity: low Requires minimal effort to implement status: under review Further discussion is needed to determine this issue's scope and/or implementation topic: UI/UX User interface or user experience related work type: feature Introduction of new functionality to the application
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#15981 - Make device description a clickable link Julio-Oliveira-Encora/netbox
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@jeffgdotorg @llamafilm @jeremystretch @Julio-Oliveira-Encora