Add capability to clone items

[bellwood]

It would be nice to be able to duplicate items where in only the name or other small bit of information is different.

Use case, I have a few different 0U PDU's all with 24 ports, being able to dupe them would be nice

[Armadill0]

I would also appreciate such a feature. My colleagues have to create several devices per week which are almost the same. This would massively enhance the speed of creating new devices.

[ghost]

Following along

[33Fraise33]

Are there any plans on implementing this feature? Even though it's a "minor feature" it speeds up the process of documenting big installations with equal products of which only the serial number and name are different.

[bdlamprecht]

Just for informational purposes, I'm adding my comments from NTC Slack concerning this FR:

Yeah, if [this] FR could be extended to include ConfigContexts that would be great!

[DanSheps]

If someone could extend this to include what they would like to see cloned on the individual models (Ex: Device, do we want: Interfaces, Front Ports, Rear Ports, Console, Power? What about IP Addresses? What about VLANs?)

[33Fraise33]

My idea is the following:

user clicks clone:
The create device form opens with all items filled in from the previous device. That way the most items can be unchanged but the things needed can be changed.

[candlerb]

@DanSheps:

If someone could extend this to include what they would like to see cloned on the individual models (Ex: Device, do we want: Interfaces, Front Ports, Rear Ports, Console, Power? What about IP Addresses? What about VLANs?)

When you clone a Device, I would say the simplest approach is to give it fresh ports from the Device Type template.

For example: you definitely don't want to copy interface MAC addresses from the original device. It's very unlikely you want to duplicate linked IP addresses, which result in conflicts. I suppose sometimes you might want interface descriptions copied, but other times not (e.g. if description gives specific use case or customer reference)

So having a clean set of components would be fine IMO.

@33Fraise33:

user clicks clone:
The create device form opens with all items filled in from the previous device.

That's a fine suggestion. However the form for creating a device does not include Interfaces (or other components like power ports), and if it did, the Interfaces wouldn't include IP Addresses. This would require the device creation form to be a nested form - which would be a nice feature, but is a separate issue.

Creating the set of components from the Device Type template is (I think) the least surprising behaviour, since this is what a normal Device create does, and indeed is built into the model in Device.save

---

There is a related issue: in the case of a Virtual Machine, there is no equivalent to Device Type (#1492). Cloning a virtual machine could copy the named set of interfaces from the source, but clean them up (remove MAC/description). If the same logic were implemented for Device I'd be fine with that too.

This could be done by including a hidden field containing either a reference to the source device/VM, or a list of interfaces to create; and probably some text showing what interfaces are going to be created.

(Aside: VMs would particularly benefit from having a nested form, allowing you to create one or more interfaces at the time of creating a VM. A VM with no interfaces is useless, and it's painful to have to go through three different steps: create VM, add interface, add IP address. But that's a point for #1492)