Many of our customers spend a lot of time making up custom groups in their installation of FCC (or any other management application) but a fair number miss out on some quick methods to organize computers via some simple tricks within Core Console.
FCC allows users to create a series of automatic filters on user defined groups that can place workstations matching a specific criteria into the appropriate folder automatically. The way that this feature was implemented you can filter on any of the fields that are shown in the FCC console.
As you can see there’s a number of them in there.
Most people catch on to the exact match options in the Filter portion of Core Console, but the third option in the list “matches regular expression” is by far the most powerful as the end user can build their own query to match on any aspect of a given field.
For example if you wanted to filter for any computer starting with the word “Client” in the name you can use the filter below:
^Client*
The process for setting this up is shown below:
1. Right click on your user defined group and select Add/Edit Dynamic Filter.
2. In the Dynamic Filter dialog box click on Add.
3. In the rule editor dialog give this rule a unique name and click Add to add a criteria to the filter.
4. In the Clause Editor dialog select the Colum that you are going to sort on in the Column drop down box, and the option matches regular expression in the Comparison drop down box. Enter the filter that you want to use in the Value text entry field. In our case we want to capture any workstation who’s name starts with “client” so we enter “^client*” in the dialog. Click OK
5. If you want to add additional filters to this rule click on Add and add the appropriate filter as per step #4, if you are finished click on OK.
6. To apply this rule to the group ensure that it is checked, and click OK.
7. In this case you can see the two workstations, client1 and client2 both filtered into the user defined group automatically. The presence of the funnel beside the computers name shows that it has been added to the group based on a filter as opposed to being manually added.
If you are not familiar with regular expressions and how they are constructed there are lots of resources out there on the web that can give you a heads up on how they are constructed.
