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Favorite servers in Dynamic Folders

Hey


We are having a rather big setup with Royal TS(X) (and Server) where we are having more than 30 engineers actively using Royal TS(X). Our setup consists over 3500 servers that needs to be loaded into Royal TS.


Obviously our structure is pulling data from our CMDB using Dynamic Folders. Then propagating a Dynamic Folder for every customer we are having. When loading a specific customer, then we retrieve all servers and create them into different objects (Remote Desktop, Terminal, ...).


Due to the big setup, specific engineers are only working on a subset of our servers. We can specify certain servers as favorites through the Dynamic Folders, but every engineer will get the same favorites. That is not what we want.


We would like to have a solution, where an engineer can favorite a server that's propagated through Dynamic Folders. On our end it is no issue to have a dynamic identifier in the folder structure or in the objects (servers) itself, so you can make references. We can either create a unique ID known to us or create some kind of hash, no issue at all.


This is one of the features that we have lots of feedback on, that they really need it. Because looking/filtering through all the servers is a tedious job where they are losing lots of time.


Ideally it would be great (nice to have) that an engineer is able to structure the favorites into different folders.


Hopefully this is something that could be implemented.


Kind regards

Jeffrey


3 people like this idea

Hi,

any news on this?

Idea taken or not?


Regards

Markus

Hi!


this is currently a limitation of dynamic folders. Right now, it's not that easy to provide this functionality but we keep this on the radar and as soon as we have the infrastructure, we will implement this feature.


Regards,
Stefan

Just started using dynamic folders, love it.  But really need a way to separate out most commonly used connections.  I even tried a custom property or field, apparently not supported for dynamic folders.

Any updates on this requested feature update?

Currently running 6.1.50722

Thanks,

Kurt

We are now at version 7 and it is, sadly, still not possible to create faviourites for dynamic folder connections. I am also being asked by multiple people here if that's possible and I also could probably add whatever is required to the dynamic connections to make this feature happen.

Hi,


I'm also waiting for an implementation in Royal TS (either with the object name or with an ID).


In the meantime, I put the list of favorites in a file and my Dynamic Folder in Powershell reads this file and applies the Favorite attribute if it's in the list.

$ListFavorites = (Get-Content -Path "c:\xxxx\Royal_TS_DynamicFolder_Favorites.txt") -replace "\s", "" -split ","
[...]
foreach($Object in $ListObjects.Objects) {
	if ($ListFavorites.Contains($Object.Name)) {
		$Object.Favorite = $true
	}
}
$ListObjects | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 100 | Write-Host


Thinking about it I also came to the conclusion which is similar to what Damien proposed. I think it is easiest to create the list as part of the dynamic folder script. I already have provided a section where people can type in their settings in the script (such as PuTTY terminal preferences). I will extend that section to include a list which people can use to fill in their faviourites. This list will then be used by the genarating part to create a separate section of favourite connections. Not pretty but it works.

You could use command tasks to automatically set/unset a favorite and store it in a dedicated file which is also read and processed when you create the dynamic folder contents. 


By doing this you can decide how you identify a favorite. The main issue to support this out of the box is the issue that we don't really know if objects are always created using the same ID. Sometimes you can identify objects by the ID when reloading a dynamic folder, sometimes you have to use the name or some other property. In addition to that, it's also not really deterministic in a sense that we don't know when objects disappear for good. So over time you end up with a large file with entries for favorites which do not exist anymore and never will again. This are only two aspects which makes it hard to implement and support.

If the unique ID is the only issue how about this: I for my part can make sure I assign unique IDs to connections. Royal TS could allow setting a favourite if unique IDs are provided. If not and the ID was generated by Royal TS the connection cannot be added to favourites. As for the ever growing list of dead favourites you could  start to automatically remove entries that have not been seen for timespan x after and y regeneration of the dynamic folder.


This approach only fails if users say they provide unique IDs but in fact they don't... you can try to detect this and warn them (for example if there are multiple entries which are identical but differ only by their Id between reloads) but I would not do so. You do have to start making assumptions at some place.


In the mean time I will look at the command task as a workaround. Thanks for the hint!

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