Questions on extending the MIQ Framework (Portal alterations/adding Rails MVCs...)

[aliew]

Hi,

The I.T. company I work for is interested in acquiring either Manage IQ or the derived platform of CloudForms for its network operations and automation portal.
We’ve found the platforms to be very powerful in managing objects within the object space that it exposes through its object model (such as Virtual Machines) but very difficult to customize otherwise.

Questions

We seek additional functionality in extending the platform. Questions are as follows:

• Is there a guide for making extensions to the portal itself. Outside of internal Ruby Scripts/CFME dialogues?
• How can we add Ruby on Rails controllers/views/models to subsequent portal tabs?
  We need to do this as we intend to implement our own internal firewall and ticket management systems and fully integrate them with the portal.
• How do we access and manipulate CloudForm’s $evm object from a ruby web page outside of CFME such as from a .rb file from a separate Ruby on Rails application?

My Research Background so far is as follows:

• Read through the “Mastering Cloudforms Automations”
  book by Peter McGowan
  https://access.redhat.com/mastering-cloudforms-automation

• Basic level of experience in Ruby on Rails and have built several skeleton websites
  based on:
  https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby-on-rails
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPy0GQJLZUM
  https://www.railstutorial.org/

• Setup both CloudForms and ManageIQ running using their .OVA image with Virtual Box in a local environment. Have used the former extensively to follow the CloudForms tutorial above.

• We have CloudForms running with VCenter in a test environment at work.

• I’ve tried installing and using 15 of the modules from:
  https://depot.manageiq.org/
  however, all those that I tried so far are for altering scripts/dialogues within cloud forms itself rather then extending the underlying framework itself.

• I’ve followed this guide for adding tabs to the portal:
  http://www.tigeriq.co/menu-plugins-for-external-sites-on-cfme-4-1/
  This was of particular interest as it changed the framework to allow linking to internal pages and https pages. Though this still isn’t quite as extensive as we hope to achieve.

Thanks in advance for any help on this matter.

[pemcg]

How do we access and manipulate CloudForm’s $evm object from a ruby web page outside of CFME such as from a .rb file from a separate Ruby on Rails application?

Glad you’ve found the book useful. Much of the object information that you have access to using the local $evm object is also available via the REST API (http://manageiq.org/docs/api). Can you provide an example of the sort of thing you like to be able to do remotely?

pemcg

[aliew]

Thankyou Peter,

I found your book very useful.

I was recently updated by my team that having everything in the same application is much more preferable.

We’re hoping to achieve the following locally:

• Create a custom rails controller and model
• Link the above to Manage IQ’s Postgres database through the relevant rake commands
• Create a view for the controller
• Make a custom tab e.g. “external” that links to the view.

For example:
http://imgur.com/a/1OPML?
If I was to follow the steps in making a blog post MVC in a process similar to:
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPy0GQJLZUM
what would I need to do to link that into CloudForms?

[aliew]

Could anyone tell me how to prevent CloudForms or ManageIQ from caching controllers, routes and views?

I noticed that changing the code, will not have its changes reflected in the application until:
systemctl restart evmserverd
is run

I have tried the following in vmdb/app/controllers/ApplicationController.rb

before_filter :set_cache_headers

_ private_

_ def set_cache_headers_
_ response.headers[“Cache-Control”] = “no-cache, no-store”_
_ response.headers[“Pragma”] = “no-cache”_
_ response.headers[“Expires”] = “Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT”_
_ end_
end

however it had no effect.

Thanks in advance