Draft: POC: Display Runners list in another format
POC Background
The issues page is the go-to page for many users and it's a very useful way for users to see a large amount of information at a glance. At the same time, in &4691 we want to offer our users a more powerful tool to manage large amounts of runners and display a lot of information about them at a glance.
What does this MR do?
This MR is a proof pf concept of what the runners list would look like if we used a format similar to the one used for issues (and merge requests). It uses the familiar patterns so administrators can find easily what they are looking and filter the runner they need.
Vision
Runner's administrations does not only occur at the admin level, but at the group and project level, and as such, users of different levels of expertise may need to administer their runners. We will eventually have a similar UI at all these levels.
This UI also allows us to grow to do bulk operations https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/bulk_editing.html.
Current Challenges
This is what the current admin UI looks like:
In a table, adding more columns is difficult, as visually the table will not fit all the information needed. At the same time, space is wasted because users that don't use a certain feature (like runner tags) will see a lot of empty columns.
In the same way, a field with a long value (like a long runner description or an ipv6 address) may not fit in the space allotted for the column.
Proposed solution
To display the same information as the current runners table to display the data. This POC attempts to balance the needs of users that manage 100s of runners and users that may administer just a few of their projects.
As a gif to show some tooltips used:
Questions we want to answer:
- Is this UI format a direction we want to iterate on?
- What if we use the Issues list UI to show our runners?
- Is this UI useful for administrators?
- Could it scale to include group and project administrators?