awx/docs/inventory_refresh.md

Inventory Refresh Overview

Tower should have an inventory view that is more aligned towards systems management rather than merely maintaining inventory for automation.

Inventory Source Promotion

Fact Searching and Caching

Smart Inventory

Starting in Tower 3.2, Tower will support the ability to define a Smart Inventory. You will define the inventories using the same language we currently support in our Smart Search.

Inventory Changes

• The Inventory model has a new field called kind. The default of this field will be blank for normal inventories and set to smart for smart inventories.

• Inventory model as a new field called host_filter. The default of this field will be blank for normal inventories. When host_filter is set AND the inventory kind is set to smart is the combination that makes a Smart Inventory.

Smart Filter (host_filter)

The SmartFilter class handles our translation of the smart search string. We store the filter value in the host_filter field for an inventory. This value should be expressed the same way we express our existing smart searches.

host_filter="search=foo"
host_filter="groups__search=bar"
host_filter="search=baz and groups_search=bang"
host_filter="name=localhost or group__name=local"

Acceptance Critera

When verifying acceptance we should ensure the following statements are true:

• Inventory has a new field named kind that defaults to empty and can only be set to smart.
• Inventory has a new field named host_filter to empty and can only be set to a valid SmartFilter string.
• Inventory with a host_filter set and a kind of smart will have a hosts list reflecting the results of searching /hosts with the same smart search that is set in the host_filter.

API Concerns

There are no breaking or backwards incompatible changes for this feature.

Other Changes

Background Deleition of Inventory

InventorySource Hosts and Groups read-only