The printer card was a name followed by a comma-joined string of cartridges and
a location - the widest row on the board, and the one running past the card
edge.
Now: the printer name links to its page and reveals its location on hover, and
each depleted cartridge is its own chip showing "Black 4%", revealing the part
number to order on hover. The percentage says something is wrong; the part
number says what to do about it, which today means opening the printer's page
to find out. Every capacity tier is listed, as the report has always done.
Two additions to the card contract, both general: 'chips' maps a row key to a
list of {text, title, level}, and 'titletooltip' puts context on the row title.
Nothing load-bearing goes in a tooltip - hover is not discoverable and does not
exist on touch - so a chip always states the fact and only explains it on hover.
Chips are bordered rather than filled: a row of solid red pills reads as an
emergency even when a cartridge is merely low.
Also repaired a self-inflicted mess. A string-slice edit used a marker that
appears EARLIER in the file, so the slice was empty and two helpers were
injected at line 1, above the module docstring. Removed; the file parses and
the helpers live beside the route they serve.
Three faults, visible only once the board ran against production data.
BACKUPS SAID THE WHOLE FLEET HAD STOPPED. The lastseenat backfill was wrong. It
seeded from collectedat, reasoning that the last change was the last provable
moment - but an unchanged config writes no revision, so a machine whose settings
last changed nine months ago got a nine-month-old lastseenat and was instantly
reported as a dead backup. Every chain lit up at once, which is worse than no
card: it says the site is broken when it is fine.
The honest value is NULL. Before the column existed nothing recorded when a
config was last confirmed, and inventing a date does not change that. Migration
0003 clears the backfill, and staleness now IGNORES a NULL chain rather than
substituting timestamps that mean something else. A chain becomes measurable the
first time its PC posts, which for NTLARS is within a day.
TONER READ "None%". The supply dict has no 'percent' key - it is 'remaining'.
Supply names are also shortened, because "Black Toner Level 4%" spends three
words saying what the card already says.
THE CARDS READ AS WALLS OF TEXT. Rows wrapped into paragraphs and a card with
forty PCs pushed everything below it off the screen. Now: at most five rows with
"and N more", one line per row that truncates rather than wraps, meta pushed
right and dropped first since it matters least, and severity reduced to a small
dot beside an uppercase label instead of a coloured card - six severity-painted
cards read as a crisis, which is how a board stops being read.
Worth recording that none of this could fail in a test. Every one needed real
data on a real fleet.
Second wave-one card. GET /api/computers/dashboard/quiet lists two populations
and deliberately does not merge them into one count. A PC that reported and
went quiet is probably off, moved or broken. A PC that has NEVER reported is
worse: not enrolled, or enrolled against the wrong pc-type, so nothing enforces
anything on it and no backup of it exists. That one hides indefinitely because
nothing about it fails loudly - the same shape as the bay that carried a wrong
machine number for weeks.
Never-reported sorts above the merely quiet, then longest silence first: the
order someone should work down the list, not the order rows left the table. A
soft-deleted PC is excluded - a decommissioned machine is silent on purpose,
and listing it would train people to ignore the card, which is the failure this
whole board exists to avoid.
The window is computers_quietreporthours, default 24, because every site will
disagree with any number picked here (ADR-015). A malformed value falls back
rather than failing the card.
This also replaces the computers plugin's old widget declaration, which named a
component nobody ever wrote. Four such declarations remain and will convert as
their cards arrive.
Two fixes to the renderer found while wiring this up. Meta specs now support a
trailing unit, so a row reads 'quiet for 3 days' rather than 'quiet for 3'. And
the card styles hardcoded hex colours against the frontend standard, including
a var(--card-bg) that DOES NOT EXIST - the variable is --bg-card - so the
fallback would have painted every card white and broken dark mode entirely.
Now --bg-card, --border, --danger, --warning, --primary and --link throughout.
The frontend now calls /api/dashboard/widgets. It never had, which is why five
plugins have been declaring widgets into a void for months, pointing at
components nobody ever wrote.
Core owns three generic renderers - exceptions, metric, list - and a plugin
declares data, a shape and a link template. The mapping logic lives in a plain
module beside the component, the same split as pluginAssetPanels.js, so it is
unit tested without mounting anything: 16 tests covering row mapping, empty
handling, ordering and gating.
The behaviours worth naming, because each is a decision rather than an
implementation detail:
Cards fetch INDEPENDENTLY and a failure becomes null. One hung endpoint - a
Zabbix call, a plugin mid-upgrade - cannot blank the board. A card whose fetch
failed HIDES rather than drawing empty, because "nothing wrong" and "I could
not tell" must not look the same.
Empty cards disappear by default. A card reporting nothing every day teaches
people to stop reading the page, which is precisely how a fleet log reached
3,234 lines with 17 that mattered. A card opts into a one-line presence only
when its absence is itself news.
Severity outranks position, so an info card can never sit above a failure.
Permission filtering happens BEFORE fetching: no point firing a request that
would only 403, and the dashboard must not become a way around RBAC.
An unknown render mode is skipped, so a plugin built against a newer core
degrades instead of leaving a hole.
A row whose link substitution is missing keeps the row and drops the link -
a PC shopdb does not know still reports its failure, and that is the bay most
likely to be misconfigured.
Cards sit ABOVE the totals: what needs a person first, context second. The
existing stat cards are untouched for now.
