Overview
The UI allows the user to view and control jobs that have been submitted to the Tractor queue. It also provides information about the tractor-blades that have connected to the engine.
To start a Dashboard session, direct your web browser
to:to http://tractor-engine/tractor/dashboard
/oror, if you have chosen other hostnames or ports
:to http: //your_engine_host:your_engine_port/tractor/dashboard
.
Important
Although the Tractor Dashboard is accessed like a simple web page, it is a full-blown application and, as such, it will consume a non-trivial amount of memory, especially in sophisticated pipelines where data might be large.
It's also worth noting that browsers perform differently when executing javascript. Safari and Google Chrome have been the strongest performers in our testing. Firefox works very well, but is a bit slower. We suggest that you test different browsers when running the Tractor UI.
Login Panel
If this is the first time you've connected to the Dashboard, you may be required to log in. Currently any username that is valid on the engine's host is acceptable. Once logged in, the Job List pane will display jobs for that user. A cookie will be stored in your browser that will allow you to connect without the login in future sessions.
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UI Hints
Each pane has specific UI functionality, which is detailed on the pages linked to above. The main Dashboard window provides the following functionality:
Pane Resizing
The main display panes can be resized by dragging the pane dividers.
Pane Closing
A pane can be closed or opened by clicking on the light midsection of a pane divider. When the task graph pane has been closed, data to render the graph will not be requested from the engine since the the graph would not be visible anyway. This can be helpful to keep the dashboard responsive when selecting very large jobs.
Window Resizing
If you resize the entire browser window, the panes will resize to fit in the new window with the same orientation/aspect-ratio.
Column Sorting
Clicking on any of the headers in a list view will cause the items to be sorted by the associated attribute. Clicking a second time on the same header will reverse the sort.
When a new sort column has been selected, the prior sort column is used for secondary sorting. For example, selecting the "Owner" header and then the "Priority" header in the Job List pane will cause the jobs to be ordered by priority, and jobs of the same priority will be ordered by owner.
Column Resizing and Reordering
The columns in list views can be resized by dragging the separator between the column headers. The can also be reordered by dragging the column header to the side of another column.
Z to Scroll Selected Item into View
Pressing the 'Z' key in any view will cause the selected item to be scrolled into view. This is useful when a user has been browsing through large lists or job graphs and may otherwise have difficulty finding the selected item.