Remove actions from List Views

[chessbyte]

One of the complexities of the UI code is allowing a single operation to apply to multiple items on a list view. I am questioning the value of this to the user. Removing this support will simplify the code by removing checkbox management, not asking every item on the list view if an action is supported before enabling/disabling the button and likely improve UI performance. This is a "less is more" type of issue.

[chessbyte]

If we can agree on this one, I will add it to the list here

[Fryguy]

There are 2 facets to "bulk actions":

• An action that takes multiple objects as a parameter
• An action that runs on multiple objects independently

I believe the UI does only the latter. For example, you check a bunch of VMs, choose "Power Off", and you get a bunch of independent power off tasks

If we do remove bulk actions, then it will become tedious for the end user to do "the same operation" across multiple VMs. So, the real question is, which actions are users likely to use in a bulk fashion often enough that it saves them on the tedium of going one-by-one manually. Even power on/off on a bunch of VMs feels like something a user wouldn't do all that often. @agrare Thoughts?

I think I need to see a list of the current set of bulk actions out there in the UI.

Also note that the API does allow bulk actions as well, so we could use that a semi-backward compatible way to do things.

[agrare]

I can absolutely see users selecting a number of vms, powering them all off and then destroying them all.
Actually I think it is something at least our vSphere users do relatively often because vSphere doesn't make it easy to bulk-select and destroy VMs.

[chessbyte]

Then I wonder if there is a way we can allow the use cases we want to cover in a different way. For example, maybe we allow to stop and destroy multiple VMs within a single provider. Then, the UI would not need to keep asking every VM whether it supports stop and destroy. Right now, the bulk actions are done too generically code-wise, IMO.

[agrare]

Yeah I could see disabling bulk-actions on any screen that isn't scoped to objects of the same type (all vms, all hosts)

[chessbyte]

Maybe we should only allow bulk actions when a list view is scoped to a single provider (or more granular). Then we can query the class once to see if an action is supported before enabling an action button. Also, we should review one by one all the current bulk actions supported in UI and make sure that it aligns with real use cases. Maybe I can do that as I try to finish the transition from AvailabilityMixin to SupportsFeatureMixin

[Fryguy]

I think that will cause usability issues. That is, if a user goes to the vms page, it visually looks almost exactly the same as the user going to the ems then clicking the list of vms. But one page will have bulk choices and the other won't, which is just confusing.

I'm not sure I understand the problem we are trying to solve here, though I do agree that less is more, so if there are some bulk choices that don't make sense, we should remove them.

[Fryguy]

Related to #6818

[Fryguy]

Decided to remove "Rename VM" from the various non-VM pages here: #7912 (comment)

[miq-bot]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not been updated for at least 3 months.

If you can still reproduce this issue on the current release or on master, please reply with all of the information you have about it in order to keep the issue open.

Thank you for all your contributions! More information about the ManageIQ triage process can be found in the triage process documentation.