Justin Read over your email, really liked the proposal - I think all of them are very good and useful.
Please post the code if you need someone to test it. Thanks ilya -----Original Message----- From: Justin Grudzien [mailto:grudz...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 11:51 PM To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org Subject: cloudmonkey printing enhancements proposal My company is building a private cloud and we are moving to cloudstack. As we begun investigating the cloudmonkey CLI we found that the output was slightly hard to read. I have begun working on some optimizations that I think will benefit the community and I reached out to Rohit, who recommended that I join this list and present my ideas. Here is what I am proposing: 1. Add json output to cloudmonkey I have accomplished this by adding a config parameter called display, which can be set to json, tabularize, or default. I have removed the tabularize parameter. Justins-MacBook-Pro:cloudmonkey grudzien$ cloudmonkey list users account=grudzien { "count": 1, "user": [ { "account": "grudzien", "accountid": "b799783d-e5bb-460a-be0e-3966bd69edda", "accounttype": 1, "apikey": "*nokey*", "created": "2013-03-27T16:09:17-0500", "domain": "ROOT", "domainid": "7e61c32f-9873-4944-947a-dcc00d3bebdc", "email": "grudz...@gmail.com", "firstname": "Justin", "id": "265930bc-62ef-41f8-849c-e58593ca4b1f", "lastname": "Grudzien", "secretkey": "*nokey*", "state": "enabled", "username": "grudzien" } ] } 2. Add filtering as a standard parameter for all output types. The only thing that has filtering now is the tabular output and grep breaks the json. Justins-MacBook-Pro:cloudmonkey grudzien$ cloudmonkey list users account=grudzien filter=account,email,username,state { "count": 1, "user": [ { "account": "grudzien", "email": "grudz...@gmail.com", "state": "enabled", "username": "grudzien" } ] } 3. Add color to the json output I was thinking of colorizing the keys in the key/value pairs to increase readability. 4. Move the color option from the config file to the command line. There are two reasons for this. First, I want to be able to wrap a script around cloudmonkey and not have to worry about colorization that will impede me processing the output and second I think it would be more useful to use the highlighting on demand rather than having to back out of the shell to edit a config file. 5. Standardize messaging for the output types. Right now certain kinds of messaging is presented differently for an output type. For example, if I issue an api command that doesn't exist it displays a generic error message, regardless of the output type selected. Ideally, all output would be in the specified format. I have the first two working and am planning on implementing the others as I flesh them out. I will submit a patch when I feel it is ready. Any early feedback on whether these changes will be useful to others is appreciated. Justin
