Discussion about a new Dashboard

Dashboard
101

Ok not sure whether my usage would be multi-user or not to be honest. We had a very interesting discussion about having 'affordable' touch screen devices in the rooms of a house, where a Node-RED dashboard is being displayed. And each room needs to display another Node-RED dashboard: e.g. in the entrance hall you want to display a dashboard with an alarm keypad, in the bathroom you want to show temperature/humidity, and so on... To summarize: wall mount Amazon Fire 7 tablets which display a dashboard running on a central Raspberry, because such devices have not enough system resources to run Node-RED locally. But it would be very pity if I had to install N Node-RED instances, to host N different dashboards.

Such typical home automation situations should be easy to implement using a single Node-RED instance IMHO ...

But perhaps you guys have already other solutions in mind for this.

Yes indeed that is something that is not easy to solve in the current model. Entirely correct. Going to ask some (perhaps stupid) questions to understand it a bit better:

  • When you say "programmatically" then you mean a code snippet in the layout manager, or something else? I have not needed something like that yet, but I can imagine that some folks program this kind of stuff in a UI template node currently? Or do you mean that it is currently (in a template node) only possible for basic widgets (e.g. md-button) and that you can e.g. not add N instances of my node-red-contrib-ui-svg node on a screen programmatically, to show the floorplans of N floors in my house?

  • When you say "layout stuff" do you mean an easy way to specify css styles, or an out-of-the-box available layout manager? Because I can indeed understand that you want to use an existing layout manager, to avoid reinventing hot water. It is not a secret anymore that I like the current model, so I am going to give it yet another try :roll_eyes:. @Steve-Mcl integrated some time ago a third party SVG editor inside our node-red-contrib-ui-svg node, because we didn't want to spend the remaining of our miserable lives to develop a graphical SVG drawing editor ourselves. So we integrated an existing SVG editor (DrawSvg) in our node. Isn't something like that possible perhaps. That you can access the third-party layout manager easily from the flow editor, and the layout manager shows and manages the UI nodes in Node-RED. I mean dual way (like we do with DrawSvg):

    1. I see in my Twitter feeds that a nice new UI node has been developed.
    2. I have a look at flows.nodered.org what it is all about. Yes I need to have it ...
    3. I install the UI node via the "Manage Palette" menu in my flow editor.
    4. I drag the UI node in my flow.
    5. I double click it and change some properties in its config page.
    6. I have a look at the node's info panel in the sidebar, when something is not clear to me.
    7. I hit the "dashboard layout manager" button and the (third party) layout manager opens. While opening the manager, all the installed UI nodes and the properties of all UI node instances are passed to the layout manager.
    8. In the layout manager you can change properties of existing UI nodes, remove existing UI nodes, or create new UI nodes (based on the set of installed UI nodes). But here you are working with the UI node's widget counterpart.
    9. When you leave the layout manager all node instances (and their properties) are returned to the flow editor and updated in the flows.
    10. Now I can start adding wires to my new UI node instances.
    11. I hit the "Deploy" button and my updated dashboard is up and running.

    That way would be perfect for me: I can use UI nodes in Node-RED exactly the same as non-UI nodes, and I can also enjoy the power of a full blown existing third-party layout manager.

    I have absolutely no idea if there is a layout manager available that allows such level of integration. And I am also aware that this might need to require new functionality (in the core?): e.g. in step 9 the flow editor has no idea where to add newly added UI nodes (in which flow tabsheet or at which location). So something new is required, like e.g. a visual backpack or something else where such "draft" nodes are being stored until you drag and drop them in a flow.

    And perhaps there are other disadvantages that I have not thought about, which redirects my proposal directly to the garbage bin ...

    But such a setup would make life easier for me as node developer: all things that I have learned from my non-UI node developments, I can reuse for UI node developments. For example I know how to create a complex node config screen. I could easily keep doing that: my new ui-svg node could have a complex config screen in Node-RED, while it has a very simple properties screen in the third party layout manager. That way I don't have to start studying again how I have to create complex property screens in the layout manager. I hope that makes sense somehow?

This was most probably my last attempt to keep having my belovely UI node concept in Node-RED. It is something I really like... Absolutely not because "I got used to it", but because it was one of my main reasons why I choose Node-RED at the time being. And I still like the concept, to have all my stuff in the same Node-RED way...

But if the developers of the new dashboard have another opinion about that, then I will rest my case from here on ...

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