One of our customers has asked if it is possible to surface applications from the same browser tab that Open OnDemand is launched in.
Is this possible? Or is this a feature request/design challenge?
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It’s both a feature request and a configuration item (which I’ve personally been interested in doing for a while). Up till now I was the only person really interested in it, but now that we have an actual user request we can see about putting it on our to-do list. My understanding is that the current configuration for this is system wide (e.g. there is a setting that can be adjusted to change it for all links on the site), but we had an idea on how to potentially make it user-configurable.
If you want details on how to make the system-level change, Eric can probably chime in with them.
The issue is still open: https://github.com/OSC/ood-dashboard/issues/430
At least one other site has requested this as well.
Different people prefer different behavior. OnDemand right now is a collection of independent, but loosely tied apps (Files app, Shell app, Job Composer app) and the nav menu on the Dashboard app (the app that lets you launch these other apps) is not shared across the other apps.
Early on I had every link open in the same window/tab. Then I got complaints that they lost the dashboard after navigating away. So the current rule is to open a new window/tab if you are navigating away from the Dashboard app.
Of course, this is inconsistent behavior between links on the Dashboard (the interactive apps that the Dashboard manages do not open in new tabs). And why does the user have to know that “Active Jobs” and the “Dashboard” are actually two different apps under the hood?
So yeah, we were considering adding a configuration option to at least force all links to open in the same window instead of the current behavior. That hasn’t been added yet, though it would not be difficult.
I’ll escalate the priority of the issue.
With regards to the loss of dashboard context, that is one of our UX concerns. However, a user who had interacted with OOD before noted that the behaviour had changed and asked if we could restore it. The metaphor he described previously is a sort of “Research Cluster Desktop” if you will. So a user preference/config rather than site wide config would be great.
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