Filtering records by related fields

[kemeris2000]

Is it possible to filter records by related field. For example zone__status=inactive filter does not work.

/api/plugins/netbox-dns/records/?type=PTR&status=active&zone__status=inactive

{
    "count": 35,
    "next": null,
    "previous": null,
    "results": [
        {
            "id": 1573,
            "url": "http://exmaple.domain.com/api/plugins/netbox-dns/records/1573/",
            "zone": {
                "id": 405,
                "url": "http://exmaple.domain.com/api/plugins/netbox-dns/zones/405/",
                "display": "66.133.5.in-addr.arpa",
                "name": "66.133.5.in-addr.arpa",
                "view": null,
                "status": "active",
                "active": true,
                "rfc2317_prefix": null
            },
            "display": "100.66.133.5.in-addr.arpa [PTR]",
            "type": "PTR",
            "name": "100",
            "fqdn": "100.66.133.5.in-addr.arpa.",
            "value": "repo.domain.com.",
            "status": "active",
            "ttl": null,
            "description": "",
            "tags": [],
            "created": "2023-10-01T12:31:09.429194+03:00",
            "last_updated": "2024-04-04T23:30:11.319333+03:00",
            "managed": true,
            "disable_ptr": false,
            "ptr_record": null,
            "address_record": {
                "id": 374,
                "url": "http://exmaple.domain.com/api/plugins/netbox-dns/records/374/",
                "display": "repo.domain.com [A]",
                "type": "A",
                "name": "repo",
                "value": "5.133.66.100",
                "status": "active",
                "ttl": null,
                "zone": {
                    "id": 1,
                    "url": "http://exmaple.domain.com/api/plugins/netbox-dns/zones/1/",
                    "display": "domain.com",
                    "name": "domain.com",
                    "view": null,
                    "status": "active",
                    "active": true,
                    "rfc2317_prefix": null
                },
                "active": null
            },
            "active": true,
            "custom_fields": {
                "country": null,
                "country_code": null
            },
            "tenant": null,
            "ipam_ip_address": null
        },
    ]
}

[peteeckel]

Obviously not :-)

I'll investigate whether that is a bug or a (Django/NetBox) 'feature'.

[peteeckel]

OK, done. It's a 'feature'.

In the current implementation of filtersets filter expressions apparently filters can't be nested, so in order to do fully orthogonal nested filtering all filters related to Zone need to be redefined in the filterset for Record in order to be usable in queries. This does not really scale.

Example: You can filter for zone (name), zone_id, view (name) and view_id because the following filters are defined:

    zone_id = django_filters.ModelMultipleChoiceFilter(
        queryset=Zone.objects.all(),
        label="Parent Zone ID",
    )
    zone = django_filters.ModelMultipleChoiceFilter(
        queryset=Zone.objects.all(),
        field_name="zone__name",
        to_field_name="name",
        label="Parent Zone",
    )
    view_id = django_filters.ModelMultipleChoiceFilter(
        queryset=View.objects.all(),
        field_name="zone__view",
        label="ID of the View the Parent Zone belongs to",
    )
    view = django_filters.ModelMultipleChoiceFilter(
        queryset=View.objects.all(),
        field_name="zone__view__name",
        to_field_name="name",
        label="View the Parent Zone belongs to",
    )

Note that zone_status is not among them, so you can`t filter for the zone status - filters are not applied recursively.

As a little proof of concept I threw in the required filter:

    zone_status = django_filters.ModelMultipleChoiceFilter(
        queryset=Zone.objects.all(),
        field_name="zone__status",
        to_field_name="status",
        label="Parent Zone Status",
    )

And after restarting NetBox all of a sudden this query works:

https://netbox.dev.hindenburgring.com/api/plugins/netbox-dns/records/?zone_status=reserved

The bad news is that Zone currently has slightly less than 40 filters, some of which are related to objects as well, so adding them all to the Record filterset is just not feasible.

I'm afraid you'll have to filter the resulting JSON in order to achieve your goal (jq and friends to the rescue).

[kemeris2000]

Awesome, thank you for detailed explanation. Just tried GraphQL, same result

works:

query { record_list(status: "active", type: "PTR") {display, fqdn, zone {
  id, status
}}}

does not work:

query { record_list(status: "active", type: "PTR") {display, fqdn, zone(status: "active") {
  id, status
}}}

I guess jq will be best solution for now.

[peteeckel]

Not too surprising, GraphQL inherits the filtersets from the model as well, just in a somewhat more complicated way.