Configurable timezone and space units

[AndHam89]

Just as a reminder I am adding the reference to my I post where I proposed to make timezone and space unit editable from the configuration page, see
http://list.opendcim.org/private.cgi/discussion-opendcim.org/2012-November/000271.html

This is a feature request.

[AndHam89]

Sorry, new to this system.

[wilpig]

There are several issues here that need to be addressed before this can be done. I looked into doing it once before and the work required to ensure that valid timezone information was set was more than I was willing to put in at that time. For configurable measurements we will need to extend the db to say which type of measurement is being used, or agree to store all measurements as a single type then apple appropriate conversions to the output via the user settings.

The last bit of concern is that the timezone setting needs to be declared before any functions that use time in order to be effective and the current setup would need to be rethought. Another idea here is that all times should be stored as UTC and then have the appropriate user timezone applied at output. I hope you see this is not as simple as just adding a config line and calling it a day.

[AndHam89]

Tjhanks for adding a selector for the timezone. I will have a look at it soon.

Both of the proposals, configurable measure unit and timezone, are not perfect. They are a proposal to make status quo a little better.

If the measurement unit is set once at the beginning of usage of openDCIM I don't see any harm done if no measurement is actually kept with the data. Calculation does not get invalid if actually the values would be square feet or square meter. Based on this reasoning I felt that it would help people who do meed meter instead of foot.

The timezone topic is more complicated but the proposed patch is also meant to make things a little better. Setting the timezone fixed to a value quietly in a script was to me less ideal than making this obvious to the users. But things might be more complicated as my company is currently running data centers in two different timezones. If the SNMP values are retrieved from the openDCIM server and the display is done consistently in this timezone I guess this should be a consistent handling of these values.

Most of the values configurable by the menu "Data Center Configuration" are probably values which should only be set once on the first installation and never changed again. Some application solve this by using an .ini file on the initial installation and not exposing it to the GUI.

[wilpig]

iso_8601

[AndHam89]

As I can see that you think about measurement I would like to pick up on my previous suggestion.

On the space measurement currently there only one unit possible. Even though the code carries the name of foot within, it is not taken into account in the calculation, if I am not mistaken. I would like to ask again if you might consider that it would be an option to add a configurable space measurement unit to the configuration options, see configuration_space_units.png. I could provide a patch against the current code as a proof of concept which shows how this could be potentially implemented.