Discussion/Help With Modeling

[adparis99]

I'm trying to work out the best way to model static routes via Custom Objects. I've got the fields created, but I am unsure on two things:

• Naming for the objects
• Whether to have a field for the device(s) the routes are assigned to, or whether to create a custom field on the dcim.Device pointing to the custom object type

Regarding the second bullet, I've decided to do both for the time being. So I define the device the route exists on when creating the route object, and I also assign the route directly to the device via a custom field. Hooray!

However, this is where my first bullet comes into play, as I don't know how best to name these objects. I can name them something like $device - $destination, but that seems redundant when that information already exists within the object in other fields. I can also use another field, such as just the destination, but when adding the route to the device's custom field, I get a long list of routes without a good way of knowing what's what.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

[mrmrcoleman]

@adparis99 you could just not give them a name field and identify them by the devices that they point to. Partly this comes down to where you’re going to be looking at them. If it’s in the list view for your static routes this approach could work.
You may also want to chime in on this issue which I think would help with the custom field links back to the custom objects , so we have your use case tracked: https://github.com/netboxlabs/netbox-custom-objects/issues/268

[ed-ud]

The Custom Object Type could have a field "Assigned Devices" that is a multi-object selection. That would make it easy to show a handful of linked devices in the COT object list view. Also, I believe the device itself will show a pane on it's page that lists which COT objects reference the device, so that makes it show in both places.

An alternative would be to have a Custom Field on the Device model like 'Static Routes' that references multiple COT objects. Given the lack of support for showing things referenced by a Custom Field in the normal NB pages, you'd have to make your own view to show the association between Devices and the static routes (not sure if COT will allow the normal ViewTab mechanism to create your own query/table view on a given COT).

Another alternative is to implement a COT that works like the ContactAssignment model - a ref to Device, and a ref to the static route COT, and whatever other fields you need for the assignment relationship (like an "enable/disable" flag or such... ContactAssignments have a ContactRole to "color" the assignment for a purpose). The benefit of this alternative is that it's complete separate from the other models... and the drawback is, you need some special views to make these entries show up on a Device (like the Contacts tab), and a way to make it easy to add an new assignment.