Unable to unselect single servers when selecting a full group of nodes (by status or anything else)

Bug #2056157 reported by Peter Wall
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
MAAS
Triaged
Undecided
Unassigned
maas-ui
Fix Committed
High
Unassigned

Bug Description

From MaaS 3.3 onwards when selecting a group of hosts in the UI by status or any other option you cannot deselect an individual host. In 3.2 this works fine and is useful as there may be one or 2 hosts in the group that don't require modification.

Tags: ui
Revision history for this message
Jones Ogolo (jonesogolo) wrote :

Hi Peter,
Thanks for filing this. Could you aid your description with a screenshot or screencast so we can get a better understanding of the issue?

Revision history for this message
Peter Wall (pwall-cerence) wrote :

Sure, here is a screenshot of maas 3.4.0... I can't show much more as this is in production.

As you can see, when the selection group (in this case "Deployed") is selected, I cannot unselect individual machines. So if I wanted to do all machines but one, I'd need to individually select every machine but one.

This is not the case in versions lower than 3.3.x (I believe I tested it on 3.3.4).

Cheers!

Revision history for this message
Javier Fuentes (javier-fs) wrote :

Tested and verified that 3.2 allows to deselect hosts individually after a group is selected.

Updating status to "triaged".

Changed in maas:
status: New → Incomplete
status: Incomplete → Triaged
Changed in maas-ui:
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
David Torrey (dotj) wrote :

Adding support for fixing this, as it hampers workflows for customers with large installations managed under MAAS. Customer confirmed that 3.5 still exhibits the inability to unselect individual hosts when an entire group has been selected.

Revision history for this message
David Torrey (dotj) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Peter Wall (pwall-cerence) wrote :

Any update on this issue? It's a blocker for us to move away from 3.2

Revision history for this message
Thorsten Merten (thorsten-merten) wrote :

Hey Peter and David,

To understand the solution idea that we're leaning towards, let me explain how it came to this bug:

In 3.2 you saw all machines in the list. So you selected a group in 3.2- you obviously select all the machines of this group as everything is always on screen.

We introduced pagination in MAAS (which was necessary to reduce loading times). So now you see only the first 50,100,200 machines depending on page size.

We wanted to make sure that the selecting a group still selects all machines in the group. But what happens if you navigate to the next page? What if you deselect a machine on page 1 and then another on page 3 and how will you ever be able to figure out what exactly is selected if you do not see all the data? The (somewhat too simple) solution to all these problems was: "Do not allow deselecting individual machines in a group when pagination is on. The user can still select the individual machines they want from the group."

we had a discussion on the UX side of this and what we think of doing now is very similar to what you see in gmail:

- If you select a group (or all machines on the top) you will only select what you are currently seeing on the page (instead of the entire group)
- In addition, we will show a notification such as "42 out of 420 machines selected and a link to "select all 420 machines"
- If the user clicks this link, the same notification will show the updated state, e.g. "420 machines selected"
- If the user then deselects a single machine, the notification will go back to "41 out of 420 machines selected and a link to "select all 420 machines"

[Try the flow on gmail: Use the select all button on top, it will select the mails in your inbox on the current page (usually 50), click the "select all 323.343.332 mails" link and it will display the state, deselect a single mail and 49 mails will be selected]

I'm happy to take your feedback on this.

Revision history for this message
Peter Wall (pwall-cerence) wrote :

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback, I understand the route you've taken but I also do disagree with the way this functionality has been removed. In 3.2 which still has the pagination this is available and I don't see the advantage of taking it away.

As much as I understand the point that you may not know which machines you've deselected but I would assume that the use case for wanting to do this would be if you did actually only want to remove one or two machines from the selected list. If you wanted to deselect a higher percentage but maybe not half then you would use the filters rather than selecting a full group.

I do also understand the comparison between this and gmail from a UI/UX perspective but I do think that the difference between email and virtual machines in a production environment can not be compared.

That being said, if this functionality is not going to return then I will plan around it and upgrade without it. If there's a relatively easy way to re-enable it however (even if we do it manually) then I would prefer to do that than not have it available.

Cheers!

Revision history for this message
Thorsten Merten (thorsten-merten) wrote :

Hi Peter,

thanks for the feedback. It's great to hear that you're happy with the path we're taking. We'll triage the issue into one of the next pulses and get it resolved for current MAAS. In terms of backporting we need to check how likely it is to break functionality in a 3.4 or 3.5 still.

And you are right. We had pagination before, but we did it entirely in the front-end. What we actually changed (and what I implied above but forgot to mention explicitly) is that we introduced pagination, filtering and grouping in the back-end.

Changed in maas-ui:
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in maas-ui:
status: Triaged → Fix Committed
To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Other bug subscribers

Bug attachments

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.