[jira] [Created] (FALCON-1684) UI usability improvements

["Mass Dosage (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Mass Dosage created FALCON-1684:
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             Summary: UI usability improvements
                 Key: FALCON-1684
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FALCON-1684
             Project: Falcon
          Issue Type: Improvement
          Components: falcon-ui
    Affects Versions: 0.6.1
            Reporter: Mass Dosage


The Falcon User Interface doesn't enable the most efficient usage patterns for many operational use cases. Below is a list of these, I'm not sure whether it would be better to create a separate issue for each of these or whether they're better tackled together.

* The UI isn't stateful. Any time you perform an operation the URL doesn't change and the browser's back/forward functionality doesn't work. Some specific examples of the problems this causes are:
** One can't e-mail the link of a problematic workflow to someone else in order for them to take a look.
** When working with a particular Falcon process one typically doesn't want  start at the search page every time as this requires typing in some search term followed by a few clicks in order to get to a page one could get to from a bookmark in a previous version of Falcon.
** Another typical use case is searching for and retrieving a list of the processes/feeds, then looking at an entity, and then going back to look at another entity - one has to start all over again from scratch (one can't even open in a new tab).
There are numerous other cases but watching people use Falcon to manage a lot of processes I see them typing a lot of stuff in that search box when it would be much easier to have a few things open in different tabs and/or be able to use back and forward buttons in the browser. The current setup doesn't make for very efficient or productive use. 

* Process instances aren’t ordered by date - they appear to be ordered by status and within a status by date. This is problematic when one is trying to find a particular instance whatever state it’s in. Given there are some people who presumably would like the current ordering, maybe an option to sort by field would suffice - with date sorting as standard.

* The properties of the entity aren't always straightforward to map back to the XML that actually contains them. I guess a decision has been made in the Falcon UI to hide the XML away and I can see why this would be useful in certain use cases but some kind of a "view XML source" link would be great for developers who are more used to that way of looking at things.




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