External file for mapping machines to their position on the labmap

[raymondnumbergenerator]

Right now the positions of the machines are hardcoded in the typescript file.

It would be nice if we could read the mapping off some other file and maybe also have a way of indicating if a machine is out of service there.

I don't know how we do it now but @dongkyunc used to manually edit the page if a machine was broken.

[dkess]

This is a good fit for the github.com/ocf/etc repo

[TonyLianLong]

Shall we accomplish this with a Docker volume mapping and a simple nginx configuration (with AJAX)?

[dkess]

I was imagining doing this by creating a new ocfweb API function that returns the list of desktops (just like how we have an API function for returning lab hours). However, I suppose baking this information into the Docker container could work, in that case we wouldn't use AJAX but instead probably generate a Javascript file that assigns the mapping dictionary, which would then be run by the page. That file could be generated by a Python script during the build step.

Either way, we would first need to make a YAML config file in https://github.com/ocf/etc and then make ocflib functions to parse the file, just like what we do for lab hours.

[TonyLianLong]

So every time there is a desktop change we need to re-build the container for lab map?

[dkess]

If we implemented it that way then yes

[raymondnumbergenerator]

This is mentioned in the comments for updateMap but I still think there should be also be an api function that returns all available public desktops (the list of all desktops minus the ones we mark as not being publicly available minus the ones currently in use).

This solves the problem we're discussing here and also simplifies updateMap.