Hi! This is Chris welcoming you to another edition of Last Week in ManageIQ! Let’s take a look back at all the lovely changes made to ManageIQ as we turned the calendars to August.

46 wonderful people contributed to ManageIQ last week, with 121 pull requests and 222 commits merged into master last week. Join the fun! Check out the latest on the issues tracker if you want to get involved.

Improved

Backend support for service types that are generic of a certain type.

Currently you can only create services with a limited number of specific service types (VMware, RHEV, OpenStack, etc). This improvement in the back end lays down the beginnings of creating new service types that are ‘generic’ (i.e. “Generic_VM, Generic_Container”, etc.). The idea is that a blueprint can be authored using only these generic types, laying out the architecture to an application, without the need to explicitly define the resources to make the application. There’s plenty left to do but this is a great start!

Rbac allow limits to come from the scope

The RBAC interface no longer requires you to pass limit, order, and offset explicitly in the options hash, instead pulling from the passed scope itself.

Before:

Rbac.filtered(Vm.all, :limit => 20, :offset => 40)

After:

Rbac.filtered(Vm.limit(20).offset(40))

The old hash signature is still valid for now while hashes are converted to scopes.

Fixed

Container dashboard graph failures with non-UTC timezones

With the appliance timezone set to anything other than ‘UTC’, the container dashboard showed ‘No data available’ for some of the graphs. Fixed!

Session table bloat in long running environments

It turns out the Sessions database table can grow to enormous sizes with very, very long running environments (greater than one year). This required some manual removal to allow Postgres to properly vacuum the table. A new API on Session has been added to purge session objects in batches and resolve this issue.

New

Added Blueprints REST API endpoints

This published the Create and Read parts of the Blueprints API. It provides the back end support for the new Service Designer UI (SDUI) to start fleshing out the canvas for dragging and dropping service items. Users will be able to create Blueprints, and then be able to drag other Catalog Items (or bundles) onto the canvas and save the blueprint. Neat!

Added VMware catalog parsing

The VMware catalog provides descriptors for vApp templates and corresponding VM images and now ManageIQ can collect all these available VM images! Public and private catalogs are available so a setting has been introduced to allow enablement of import of both types of catalogs (by default, only private catalogs are imported).

Deleted

Removed relative datetime support for <, >, <=, >= in MiqExpression

Tim continued his sweeping improvements to MiqExpression last week, including the removal of some unused functionality concerning relative datetimes. This brings some clarity to the code and explicitness to what MiqExpression officially supports.

Removed REST API cruft regarding Virtual Templates

With some of the forthcoming work regarding Service Brokers and Arbitration Rules, the purpose of Virtual Templates has changed. The REST API no longer needs full CRUD functionality, so hey! Let’s keep it simple and clean, removing some of that ability.

Wrapping up

As always, there were way too many PRs to cover here in detail. Feel free to check them all out here. Look out for the next installment of Last Week in ManageIQ!