Since its introduction, the Topology view in the Red Hat OpenShift web console's Developer perspective has come a long way in creatively empowering developers. It helps them break away from the limitations of text prompts, and opens a whole new world of visual-interaction-led operations. But the Topology view is not even halfway through the process in its pursuit of bringing an excellent development experience to the table.
Let's take a look at the new find feature.
Find feature
The new find feature in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.4 increases the discoverability of a component inside of a developer’s application. You can use this feature to surface the relevant component or groups by their name. This feature serves as the primary effort toward improving the Topology view to allow making fixes and enhancements more efficiently, per the feedback from OpenShift users. This feature also counts toward equipping the Topology graph view to deal with a larger canvas with a higher number of resources.
Using find
When looking for a component or group by name, users can type the character string in the text input field of the find component. If a match is found, it is surfaced on the graph view with a highlight and a higher opacity compared to the non-matches. The non-matches are still shown with subdued opacity on the graph to retain the context in which the component exists, without allowing it to overshadow the matches, as shown in Figure 1.
Viewing matches beyond the visible area
It is possible for matches to be outside of the visible area. We added a trigger to notify them of this possibility, along with a shortcut action button to fit the entire project in the view, as shown in Figure 2.
The find feature gets us a step closer to handling scalability. In future releases, we have grand plans for the Topology view.
Ready to get started?
Provide your feedback
Keep an eye out for additional options to help improve scalability in the future! Let us help you, share your thoughts here and we’ll use that as input during our next round of Topology designs. Also, join our OpenShift Developer Experience Google Group to participate in discussions and learn about our Office Hours session, where you can collaborate with us and provide feedback.
Learn more
If you’re interested in learning more about application development with OpenShift, learn more from Application development on OpenShift.
Last updated: June 29, 2020