Component

No response

Describe the Feature Request

Object Templates

The goal of this feature is provide the ability for users to define templates for Schema nodes that will allow easy and templated object creation that includes the relationships of the object.

There may be some features of templates that are delivered in later iterations, but this issue serves as a purpose of feedback into the feature and describing the use cases for the feature.

An example would be the Device Types feature in NetBox/Nautobot, but due to a flexible schema, we need to support custom objects.

Initial Ideas

• One time clone/copy on creation of the object using the template
• Create a template from an existing object
• UI workflow:
  • When creating an object, if a template is tied to the schema node, provide it as a drop down option to select a single template to generate the object from.
  • Navigate to object template and have a button to create an object based off the template
  • View object that used the template for creation

Describe the Use Case

Use Cases

1. The ability to define device types that can be used to define the different components of a device such as interfaces, etc. that will build the device in Infrahub with the defined components of the template.
2. SFP that supports breakout cables will create the necessary interfaces/relationships based on the template selected.

Additional Information

Open Questions

• What is the UI workflow for creating objects from a template? What do users think?
• How nested do the object templates get when it comes to relationships?
• How are templates managed and loaded into Infrahub?
• To attempt to make these portable, should we allow users to define the kind of object so it allows portability with custom schemas? For example, we define a device with interfaces, but the user will define the kind of interfaces?
• Is there a want for lifecycle management between the object templates and the created objects? What would this look like?

Related Issues

• feature: ability to import device models from the netbox devicetypes repo #3672