Action & Fixlet Client Inspector Limitations

Ideas
1

Many inspectors seem incomplete, particularly in lacking the ability to get the result set of a particular property to iterate over.

See this Fixlet/Task to see how I’m trying to get the following data: https://bigfix.me/fixlet/details/6201

Action Inspector

The following or similar should work when used in relevance substitution during action execution, but it doesn’t:

parameters of active action

or:

values of parameters of active action

or:

(name of it, value of it) of parameters of active action

Fixlet Inspector

This DOES work:

(name of it & "=" & value of it) of headers of fixlet whose(id of it = origin fixlet id of active action) of current site

This doesn’t work:

(name of it & "=" & value of it) of mime fields of fixlet whose(id of it = origin fixlet id of active action) of current site

This doesn’t work either:

(name of it & "=" & value of it) of fields of fixlet whose(id of it = origin fixlet id of active action) of current site

This doesn’t work either:

(name of it & "=" & display value of value of it) of fields of fixlet whose(id of it = origin fixlet id of active action) of current site
2

Some of these same limitations have stymied me for a while as well. In my patching process I have a task that polls the client on an interval to determine whether there are Actions that are still in a Pending state. It would be most convenient to use this relevance which does not work:

exists actions whose (relevant of it and pending of it)

but there is no iterator for “action”. Instead I have to rely on the action(id) inspector, and the behavior of plurality to not error out when I throw incorrect Fixlet IDs at the inspector; and use this very ugly alternative

exists actions(ids of fixlets of sites) whose (relevant of it and pending of it)

I believe we’ve also discussed in this forum at length the lack of

sections of file

and

keys of file

Also every Property that includes “of” in the property name really breaks the use of “it” substitutions. For instance key X of registry.

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3

fairly good introspection in relevance is super handy, but it is very annoying when it is missing.

Also, this is one of the areas that I wish IBM would dedicate more time / resources, because for me, inspectors is the one place I can’t get around. If they don’t exist, then I’m fairly stuck because I can’t write my own.

4

Agreed. If I have to convince my coworkers that they need to learn a new scripting language that only applies to BigFix, then having some consistency makes it an easier sell.

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