All guru types,

as you know I kind of volunteered to fold this mod back into the src
tree, but while the way I did it was useful for me (and easy), it may
not be what others want.

What I did was to have typeable fields as well as the dropdowns,
(http://www.aouk83.dsl.pipex.com/ganglia-from-to.png),
but the important step is that I pass the date strings directly through
to rrdtool itself.
Their sytax is thus http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc/rrdfetch.en.html
(scroll down to Time Spec).


What was good -
- I did not have to write any js or integrate a 3rd party calendar thing
in. I'm not a web man.
- The date spec stays in the the URL in a GET way, not lost in a POST
way, which
  means that a graph URL fully describes what is to be graphed and it
can be pasted anywhere.
- RRDTool date parsing allows for both relative and absolute times (e.g.
2am yesterday,
  04:00 10-05-2007). This proved great for us here because reports could
be produced
  by dicking with simple html and URLs without needing a report creation
system.
- Some other From/To selection systems allow flexibility of
relative/absolute when clicking
  and selecting, but by the time you get to graph.php it has becomed a
fixed absolute date/time.

What was bad (very bad) -
- RRDTool date parsing options are weird and I have no ability to get
rid of some of the strangeness.
- As the from/to fields are arguments in a URL that is inside an <IMG>,
if you get the syntax wrong
  all the graphs disappear and you have no idea what the error is.
  Unless I render the error message as a png... :-(

The Cacti one seems pretty good -
http://tools.pf.gtlogistics.com/cacti/graph_view.php?action=tree&tree_id
=3&leaf_id=18

Which way should I go? 
Does anyone have know of other really good calendar things?


kind regards,

Richard Grevis
Production Architecture
Barclays Capital, Canary Wharf, London, E14 4BB
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