Re: [RFC] cachemgr style updates

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Alex Rousskov
<rousskov_at_measurement-factory.com> wrote:
> On 01/29/2011 01:24 AM, Kinkie wrote:
>>>> I hope Squid itself will not have to output reports in more than two
>>>> formats (plain text and possibly "raw" XML of some sort). Beautification
>>>> and post-processing should be done outside of Squid key processes for
>>>> security and code quality reasons, IMO.
>>>
>>> If we can do pure XML and get the browser to stylesheet it cleanly into HTML
>>> for display then I would love to see that happen too. Otherwise we will
>>> likely be stuck with xhtml for a while.
>>
>> Can we consider the alternative of using some internal structured type
>> with inspection features and which could be rendered at emission time
>> into xml,html,text or (why not) snmp?
>
> After I posted the above, it occurred to me that recent code already
> uses raw internal binary format for most cache manager and SNMP
> exchanges. In most cases, those raw internal structures are converted to
> plain text or similar only as the last step in Coordinator.
>
> Long-term, we could move this formatting from Coordinator to some other
> program. That program can do the fancy formatting and, optionally, even
> the aggregation of data, without bloating essential Squid processes with
> XML, HTML, graph generation and such. This can be made modular so that
> others can provide their own visualization and rendering of the same raw
> data.

I'm not so sure about external programs; but the current code
generating formatted text is IMVHO quite ugly. If we could structure
it into something simple (at the end, we output either list of
name-value pairs or tables) and self-describing (think asn.1), then we
could
merge the code collecting stuff for snmp and cachemgr, and make
cachemgr modular so that either it does simple builtin visualization
(to text or html) or it offers structured data for something external
to process and present to the user (xml or snmp).

-- 
    /kinkie