xen-orchestra/docs/search.md

Live filter search

The idea is not just to provide a good search engine, but also a complete solution for managing all your XenServer infrastructure. Ideally:

• less clicks to see or do what you need
• find a subset of interesting objects
• perform bulk actions on all results found
• sort your results for more pertinent insight

Pro Tip: the URL of Xen Orchestra contains the search string, eg home?s=power_state%3Arunning+. You can share these URLs to your colleagues to share your search!

Search examples

We include some predefined filters in the dropdown "Filters":

You can use custom filters here:

Save your search

If you want to record your filter, just click on the "Save" icon

After giving a name to your filter, you will be able to find it in the dropdown filter menu.

Manage your saved search

Just go into your user panel (bottom of main left menu):

There, you can edit or remove any filter/search you've created!

Set a default search

In this user section, you can set a default filter (preset filters or your own).

Pro Tip: this is saved in your user preferences. It means that you can connect anywhere on any browser, and you'll still see the same behavior.

Filter syntax

A filter allows you to search through a collection of objects which have multiple properties and may even contain other nested objects.

Searching for a string (or substring)

Simply type the string, if it contains special characters just surround it with quotes:

• simple-string
• "string with special characters like whitespaces"

The search is recursive, case insensitive and non-anchored (i.e. matches if the pattern is contained in a string).

A simple string can also contain a wildcard character (*) to match any character in a portion of the string:

• foo*bar: matches foobar, foo - bar, etc.

Regular expression

For more advanced string matching, you can use regular expressions:

• /^DNS server \d+$/: matches DNS server 1, DNS server 05 but not DNS server
• /foo/i: with the i flag, it ignores the case, therefore it matches Foo and FOO

More information about supported regular expressions.

Searching a specific property

Type the property name, followed by a colon : and a subfilter:

• name_label:"my VM"
• virtualizationMode:hvm
• boot:order:cn

Exclusion

Prefix your filter with an exclamation mark ! to exclude any matching results:

• !hvm
• !power_state:Running or power_state:!Running

Intersection

Simply type the filter's terms side by side:

• power_state:Halted !virtualizationMode:hvm

Grouping

Parentheses can be used to group terms together:

• !(power_state:Running virtualizationMode:hvm)

Union

Pipe | followed by a group of terms:

• |(vm1 vm2)
• power_state:|(Running suspended)

Truthy property

This one is less common but can be used to check whether a property has a truth-like value (true, non-empty string or non-zero number).

Postfix the name of a property by a question mark ?:

• auto_poweron?
• high_availability?

Number comparison

You can use the search field/filter with number comparisons:

• snapshots:length:>2 (to display VMs with more than 2 snapshots)
• $VBDs:length:>=4 (VMs with more 4 or more disks attached)
• VIFs:length:>=2 (number of network interfaces)

Available properties

There isn't much documentation listing these (yet), but you can see all objects and their properties using xo-cli --list-objects. You can then use these properties for search in XOA.

Take a look at the documentation for xo-cli :)

Example: to search by the Xen Tools status:

• xenTools?: whether the tools are installed
• xenTools:"up to date": whether they are installed and up to date