Include information from a page (almost like page properties)

[Andreas Henden]

Hi

Is there a plugin or another workaround for getting information from multiple pages and multiple rows.

What I want to have is almost lage page Properties but with multiple rows.

My example:
I have one page for each server

On that page I want to have a different tables. One of the tables is a matrix  of services and what wanted status is. Like Running, Stopped, etc. and some other colums on that should happen if the status change and so on.

Then I want to have one page that have a big table of all the servers and service information from all the pages. So that the guy who is responsible to set up surveilance of the server can check one page that have information about all the services on every server.

Please send question if something was unclear...

[Rob Woodgate]

Hi Andrea,

This can be done using Page Properties and Page Properties Reports.  Unfortunately, whilst you can have multiple Page Properties macros on a single page, the Page Properties Report will only pick them up if they have different column names, so you'll have to have each server/service combination on a unique page, like this:

Treeview.png

In this example I've assumed that each server will have the same services on it.  Therefore in order to have unique page names I've used "Server1 Service1", "Server2 Service2", etc.  If each server has difference services this won't be necessary, but you'll have to add a row to the Page Properties macro to include the server name. (Another option would be to give each page a number, i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, and add the server name in a row to the Page Properties.  That would make it easier to sort on the column headers, but that's up to you.)

On each of those child pages you have a Page Properties macro like this:

Page Properties.png

Each of the child pages has the same label (e.g. "server")

On the parent page (called Servers in the screen shot of the tree view), or wherever you want to have the page for the engineers, you set up your Page Properties Report to look for these pages and you get:

Page Properties Report.png

You can set up Page Properties Reports to just show e.g. the services from Server1 by using additional labels, if that's something you want as well.

This isn't necessarily ideal - you have to have a page for each service, and the page names are a bit clunky - but if you want a free, simple way to aggregate the server data, that's the way I'd do it.

Otherwise you're looking at either Nic's multi-excerpt method, or a more manual method of aggregating the data. 

Does all that make sense?

[Rob Woodgate]

Hi Andreas,

The Page Properties Report will take columns from ALL of the Page Properties macros on a page, as long as you don't specify a Page Properties ID in the Page Properties or Page Properties Report macro. 

In the case of your example

• Let's say you have 5 servers. 
• This gives you 5 pages, each with (e.g.) 2 tables on (so 10 tables in total).
• Your 1st table has the following rows: A, B, C
• Your 2nd table has the following rows X, Y, Z
• You want your Page Properties Report to show columns A, B, Y, Z for each page.

How to do this:

1. Create each of the 5 pages, and give each one a page title of the server name (this will be the title column in your Page Properties Report).
2. On each of the 5 pages, add a Page Properties macro with a table with rows A, B, C
3. On each of the 5 pages, add a Page Properties macro with a table with rows X, Y, Z
4. DO NOT specify a Page Properties ID in any of the Page Properties macros.
5. Add the appropriate labels to each of the 5 pages (e.g. server, or whatever you want)
6. On your Overview page for the engineer, create a Page Properties Report that looks for pages with the labels that are on your 5 server pages.
7. In the Columns To Show option, add "A,B,Y,Z"
8. DO NOT specify a Page Properties ID in the Page Properties Report.
9. Save the Overview page.

The Page Properties Report will now show column A, B, Y and Z from each of the 5 server page.

Does that solve your problem?  If not, please reply and I'll rework the example.

[Andreas Henden]

I'm not sure if I understand

The thing is that on each page (server) there is

One table With services:

Service | Name | Status | On Error

------------------------------------------------

AOS60$01 | Microsoft Dynamics AX Object Server 6.3$01-MicrosoftDynamicsAX | Running | Restart 
MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS | SQL Server (SQLEXPRESS) | Running | Restart


The formatting here is a bit wrong but as you can see the table has multiple rows.

[Rob Woodgate]

Hi Andreas,

I think see what you mean:

• On each page you have 1 table representing the server.
• That table has x rows and y columns.
• Each row represents a service on the server.
• Each column represents a value for that service.
• You have multiple pages like this, 1 page for each server.

You want a page that will take the tables of information from each server page and combine it into 1 table, so that an engineer can see immediately the information for each service, on each server, all on the same page.

Is that correct?

If it is correct, do each of the pages have the same columns, e.g. Service | Name | Status | On Error ?

[Andreas Henden]

yes, that is correct.

[Andreas Henden]

yes, it makes sense. I hoped it would be a "nicer/simpler" method. There will be alot of pages!

thanks for the help!

[Rob Woodgate]

No problem.  I've done something similar for project and teams before, and yes, I wished there was a nicer/simpler method too! Good luck with it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Off-the-shelf, that sounds like the excerpt-include macro could do the job - you'd have a snippet or block of information about each server selected on source pages, and the target page would have set of excerpt-include macros on it that would pull the current data out of the source pages whenever it is viewed.

However, the macro does some formatting unfortunately, so you can't merge all of it into a table easily.  If you wanted to do it in a less structured format (a simple list), you'd be ok, but it doesn't really lend itself to standard tables.

I think you'd need to find or write a new version of the macro that can do the same job but format stuff in a table.  I've not tried this, but you might also be able to do something with user macros and custom html to turn it into a table.

[Andreas Henden]

The problem With excerpt-include is that there can be only one for each page!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, per source page.  You can put as many includes as your server can cope with on the target page. 

A lot of us install the multi-excerpt add-on when we have multiple things to extract from single pages, but that still doesn't really do the tabulation thing either.