(imported comment written by MattBoyd)
Ktakada, there’s a few things that helped me get into relevance. Below is some advice that I sent to someone a while ago about getting started:
The BigFix forum is actually a great place to get some practice writing relevance. If someone is having an issue writing a relevance query (or clause, as it’s sometimes called), I try to figure out how to write it myself by doing some research and/or testing. As time goes on and you deal with many relevance clauses, you’ll find some patterns in relevance that are useful for many different things and fairly reusable. It’s worth writing those down somewhere.
I think there are two main concepts that people have trouble grasping: The “it� + “whose” inspectors, and singular vs. plural results. Once you understand how these concepts, it becomes much easier to read and understand relevance.
I wouldn’t stress over action script. You’ll probably find that it’s very easy, and maybe a bit too simple for your needs. One thing I’ve discovered after reading older forum threads is that action script was never really intended to be a robust scripting language. There’s no looping or try/catch blocks. For most operations, action script is fine. For very complex operations, you’ll probably end up using batch files, VBScript, or Powershell.
I think you know this already, but the Fixlet and Relevance Debuggers are great tools to use for practice and testing. I use these on a daily basis, and I almost always run my relevance through the debugger before trying it in a task. It saves a lot of time.
When looking for answers, remember that there’s two ways to search the BigFix forum: http://forum.bigfix.com/search.php and http://support.bigfix.com/ . I usually try both, as they tend to return different results. Generally, http://support.bigfix.com/ returns better results more often, and includes KB articles as well. There’s also the inspector search, which you can use to find relevance inspectors that will allow you to lookup system information: http://support.bigfix.com/inspectorsearch/inspector_search.html . I use this often, but I wish BigFix, Inc. included more examples in it. Also, remember that not all relevance inspectors will work on all Operating Systems. For example, the registry and WMI inspectors won’t work on a Mac.
A lot of people tend to get frustrated and give up quickly when it comes to learning relevance, because syntactically it’s very different from SQL languages. Despite a few limitations and frustrations, such as sorting/ordering results, I find it very powerful for interrogating systems, and I haven’t found something comparable. It goes way beyond the abilities of basic WMI queries and has much better performance.
I hope this helps!
