Date threshold presentation (UX)

[NeodymiumFerBore]

Plugin Version

0.4.6

Proposed functionality

Add a way to show a Custom Object Field of Type Date or Date & time in a different color in the UI (as a badge), depending on how the set date compares to now. This could be an optional custom color, that can be set for "before", "after", or "is in less than X days". This way, a Field such as "expires at" or "starts at" can catch the user's eye in the UI (appears in green, then appears in orange when the Field "Expires At" is in 15 days or less, then in red when the date is passed, etc.).

The goal is to have some kind of date threshold data presentation (account expiration, certificate NotBefore/NotAfter, etc.).

Note: this feature is UI only. API or ORM calls do not need this to filter objects by date.

Use case

User experience. This is purely eye candy.

A detailed use-case is described by @mathieued in #431 (comment).

External dependencies

No response

[jeremystretch]

@NeodymiumFerBore please expand on the use case cited above, as the intended value is not apparent.

[mathieued]

Hello @jeremystretch, I would like to endorse this request as I think it would significantly improve the user experience on the usage of Custom Objects.

In my case, I've been using a forked version of DanSheps/netbox-lifecycle plugin for a while and have now migrated to Custom Objects for a better and easier maintainability directly through the UI.

However, a feature that I really miss from this Hardware Lifecycle plugin was the color-coded dates for EoX and Support Contracts. It has been implemented in the plugin (Link to file) to easily highlight dates that are less than 6 months away, or that are already in the past.

Below is a screenshot on how it looks on a Device card, even if I know we're not yet talking about cards directly in vanilla object views:

To me, this is useful and provides at a glance info at least for these 2 usecases - being EoX tracking, and ending Support Contracts - but I can also think of other ones such as:

• SSL/TLS certificates end dates tracking
• Lease contract return dates tracking
• Project/Deployment Milestone dates tracking

I'm not sure how much work it involves though as, to my knowledge, this feature is not implemented for any Date field in vanilla Netbox, so I wonder if it would require this change also to core Netbox, to keep consistance between the plugin and the core.

[NeodymiumFerBore]

@NeodymiumFerBore please expand on the use case cited above, as the intended value is not apparent.

Hello @jeremystretch, I added a reference to @mathieued comment in the issue description. This is exactly the use-case I had in mind, and he got it well detailed and illustrated.

Thank you for taking part @mathieued