Foglight 5.9.1 - Web Component Tutorial

Remove the title and border from the Host Chooser DDL T4 view. There is no need for these items because they take up space needlessly. For future reference, realize that setting a title automatically ensures that a border appears, but setting a border does not automatically cause a title to appear.

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Set the widths of the two charts to Automatic and the horizontal alignment to Fit Cell. Set the vertical alignment to a fixed number. This causes the charts to align themselves nicely. Later, you can also experiment with weights to see how using simple small numbers adjusts the proportion of space given to one component in comparison to another.

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Set the width of the table to Automatic, the Column Span to 2, and Scroll Bars to Auto.

The following figure gives and indication of the expected result:

Figure 8. Final dashboard

Tutorial 6: Reports

By now you should be comfortable with creating and using some of the commonly-used components in the Web Component Framework. We put them to work in this tutorial to show you how to create a report from scratch.


	TIP: You can create reports easily using the Reports home page. For instructions, see the Foglight™ User Help. While the online help provides detailed information about reports and hands-on instructions, this tutorial exposes a deeper level of report generation and is geared toward a technical audience.

There are a number of report examples that are included in the Foglight user interface, but it is likely that as you become more experienced, you want to create your own custom reports that match your exact needs. This tutorial helps you get started.

Along the way, you learn about these additional components: PDF Layout, Page Decoration, and Iterator.

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Configuring a Query

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Creating a Basic Report Page

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Creating a More Elaborate Hosts Table

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Adding a Header

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Adding a Footer

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Adding an Iterator for a Multi-Page Report

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Summary

Objectives of Tutorial 6

PDF reports are useful for archiving the status of your systems as well as for communicating its recent operational level to interested parties. Whatever your needs, the ability to create informative reports is important. The information needed in a report and the way it should be displayed vary from one enterprise to another, so typically reports are designed on site to meet local needs. This tutorial outlines the way that you can create Foglight™ reports using the Web Component Framework.

The objectives of Tutorial 6 are:

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Create a report. This task requires the creation of some context entries to set the title of the report and to retrieve a list of hosts.

At first you will create a very simple report and then you will add to it.

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Add headers and footers to the report pages.

Headers and footers are required elements in most reports. You’ll see how to add a company logo to the header of a report, and you’ll see how to add page numbers to the footer.

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Design the content of the report body and choose the proper view components based on that design.

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Embed a pair of body components in an Iterator so that similar body pages are created simply by iterating a list of hosts.

The number of active hosts monitored by Foglight is a variable. Using an Iterator permits you to pass a list of hosts resulting from a run-time query and generate a page for each host. Thus, the example serves as a paradigm for any task that performs the same set of actions on objects in a dynamically-generated list.

Designing the page

You begin by constructing the required query. Next, you create a simple report page that contains an existing view. Finally, you create a more complete report that contains a header, a footer, and an iterated view of host data. The design schematic is shown in the table.

Table 1. Report layout for Tutorial 6
Header
Single page: Utilization Summary for All Hosts
Iterated page: System Load Summary. Each page presents a time plot of host statistics and a table of high, low, and average values for selected metrics for the chosen time period.
Footer

Configuring a Query

This tutorial requires a list of hosts, just as in Tutorial 2, but this time we demonstrate a way of accomplishing the objective by using both a query and a context setting. First, you build a query that returns a HostModel, and then you will a context setting to select hosts from the HostModel object returned by the query.

To build the Host Model T5 query:

In the Module Contents pane, click the drop-down list, select Queries, and click Add

The Add Query dialog box appears.

In the Add Query dialog box, on the Create a Blank Query tab, in the Name column, click Host Model (with Monitoring in the Namespace column), and then click OK.

The Definitions pane displays the query editor, which contains the information needed to construct a query. You do not have to fill in every box, but the required boxes are marked by an exclamation point icon on the right side of the field.

In the Name box, type Host Model T5.

You will use this name later on to refer to the query.

Leave the ID box set to (auto).