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.
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