Can iApps display a textarea parameter?

Hi Sam,

 

 

iApps (and specifically APL) don't have support for multiline text entry widgets. There is an existing enhancement request (BZ372904) covering adding this (and other widgets as well) however. Please contact F5 support and reference that BZ if you'd like to add some weight to the request. Most of the workarounds that I can think of are likely unworkable: things like adding a bunch of xxlarge string inputs where each one represents a line in an iRule and then glue them all together in the implementation.

 

 

Do you actually need for the user to be able to paste in and potentially edit an entire iRule, or is your case that you have iRules that need customized in small ways for a given deployment? If that's the case, I recommend that you embed the iRule's source into the iApp's implementation, and then to ask questions in the presentation that gather the data to customize the iRule. Then in the implementation, use something like "string map" (or if you're running v11.4 use tmsh::expand_macro) to build the iRule programmatically. I can provide more details on this technique if it's interesting to you.

 

 

Your current workaround of managing the iRules outside of the iApp and then referencing them from within it is a common pattern and one that we (f5) have used for many of the supported iApps to get around this situation. If you need to accept entire free-form iRules, it's probably the best solution available right now.

 

 

Cheers,

 

-Brent