Inline Editing of E-LAN and IP Service Orders

The Manage Service Order windows that enable the provisioning of IP and E-LAN services utilize grids as a navigation element to add sites and interfaces to a VPN. In addition, grids are also used to select individual elements and configure any details that might be required for such element to be part of the VPN. For example, a typical E-LAN configuration workflow involves the following steps:

Entering general service parameters that apply to all nodes in the VPN, such as the name of the service, signaling protocol used, route distinguishers, and route targets

Selecting the set of nodes that participate in the VPN instance. Per-node parameters can be configured by going through one node at a time, or though a bulk edit operation by selecting and editing multiple nodes simultaneously.

Choosing the the set of interfaces on each node that connect to the customer devices and configure the interface-specific characteristic of each interface. Similar to the node settings, users can perform bulk edits to modify multiple interfaces at a time.

In your network environment, the E-LAN and IP services, owing to their multipoint nature, involve multiple devices and interfaces, which causes the configuration to require many steps, and becomes cumbersome and complicated. To simplify and optimize the configuration of multipoint services by allowing users to configure devices an interfaces in a grid so that the operator can easily view and modify the most important parameters of the service, the inline edit mechanism is implemented. Inline modification signifies the ability to perform changes to previously defind settings in an easy and quick manner.

Embedded editing is enabled, which causes the grids showing the devices and interfaces to become modifiable directly without the need to perform the process of highlighting, editing, and saving the changes every time you want to edit a particular parameter. The page that displays the configured settings presents as a form in which the fields or cells of the table are editable.

Because the inline edit functionality enables you to directly edit the grids, only the salient and most important parameters for each service in the grids are displayed.

For parameters that you can enable or disable, you can select or clear the check boxes.

For parameters that require a value to be specified, an auto drop-down list is displayed that enables you select a value from the list of available or configured values.

Advanced parameters can be continued to be edited by selecting the rows and clicking Edit. A popup dialog box is displayed with the list of all parameters supported for editing. You can perform inline edits by double-clicking in the cell or the field under a particular column in the table of displayed settings. The field becomes editable when you double-click within the cell.

For an E-LAN service order, the following node settings can be modified using the inline edit method:

Service loopback, Hub, Mac learning, Mac Interface limit, Mac statistics

For an IP service order, the following node settings can be modified using the inline edit method:

Node, Hub, Stitching point

For an IP service order, the following site settings can be modified using the inline edit method:

Node, Interface, Autopick Unit, Unit ID, VLAN tagging, Autopick VLAN ID, Outer VLAN ID, Inner VLAN ID, Auto pick IP, IP Address, Subnet