Dashing Chuck Norris Fact Generator Job

Readme.md

Description

Dashing job to render personalised Chuck Norris based facts into a text widget.

This job utilises the Internet Chuck Norris Database JSON api.

A randomly chosen forename and surname from an array of team members is chosen and passed to the icnd json api, and a Chuck Norris based fact, with the Chuck and the Norris replaced with our teammembers name is returned, and then sent to a dashing widget.

Installation

Put the chuck.rb file into the /jobs directory.

Add an entry into your dashboard file - see the example.

If you need to use a proxy, populate the details in chuck.rb and comment/uncomment the appropriate res = ... line.

Some of the icnd jokes might be seen to be a bit cheeky, so use can try to limit those by altering the limitTo attribute - see the api.

chuck.rb

require 'net/http'
require 'json'
require 'cgi'

#The Internet Chuck Norris Database
server = "http://api.icndb.com"

#Id of the widget
id = "chuck"

#Proxy details if you need them - see below
proxy_host = 'XXXXXXX'
proxy_port = 8080
proxy_user = 'XXXXXXX'
proxy_pass = 'XXXXXXX'

#The Array to take the names from
teammembers = [['Mickey','Mouse']]

SCHEDULER.every '30s', :first_in => 0 do |job|
    random_member = teammembers.sample
    firstName = random_member[0]
    lastName = random_member[1]

    #The uri to call, swapping in the team members name
    uri = URI("#{server}/jokes/random?firstName=#{firstName}&lastName=#{lastName}&limitTo=[nerdy]")

    #This is for when there is no proxy
    res = Net::HTTP.get(uri)

    #This is for when there is a proxy
    #res = Net::HTTP::Proxy(proxy_host, proxy_port, proxy_user, proxy_pass).get(uri)
    
    #marshal the json into an object
    j = JSON[res]

    #Get the joke
    joke = CGI.unescapeHTML(j['value']['joke'])

    #Send the joke to the text widget
    send_event(id, { title: "#{firstName} #{lastName} Facts", text: joke })

end

dashboard.erb

...
<div data-id="chuck" data-view="Text" data-title="Team Facts" data-moreinfo="Team Member Facts.">
...

Thanks for the cool idea. I had no idea a Chuck Norris DB existed! I noticed that some HTML entities (") were showing up in the text. I was able to unescape them by using the cgi gem and modifying the joke variable:

require 'cgi'
...
joke = CGI.unescapeHTML(j['value']['joke'])

i love this! :)
and i want it for our dashboard ...

Cool - I'm glad it's getting some use.

Much enjoyed, thank you!

I just put it up on a dashboard I'm putting together for a client with all the employees names listed, let's see how long time it takes before one of the boring types that's working there complains ...

Cool thing, thank you very much!
I'll keep it on our dashboards as long as my boss lets me. :-)

Cool. We used to have this for Jenkins.