Template building blocks

There are certain features you can use when building a template that enable you pass values between actions (like a volume name), conditionally branch to connect actions together (enable backups on a new volume), and that help your users customize resources when using the template.

Special template controls

Before you start creating your template, you should understand some special options that you can set when pre-populating a value for a parameter in a template.

A screenshot of the editable and drift on options that you can set for parameter values.

Editable checkbox

Check this box to let the storage admin override the pre-populated value you have entered in the template. This gives the storage admin a suggestion for what the value should be, but it allows them to customize the value when creating the resource.

When unchecked, the user can’t change the value and the hard-coded value in the template is always used when the admin deploys a resource.

Drift checkbox

Check this box so that BlueXP monitors the hard-coded value you entered for a parameter when a resource is created with the template. Later, you can run a Drift Report to see which fields configured with Drift are no longer compliant with the template settings.

When unchecked, the user can change the value to any value after the resource has been created.

Note For the drift feature to work, after you have defined drift for some parameters in the template, you must enable the drift feature for the template. This is the last step when creating a template. Drift doesn’t work if it is enabled for a parameter but hasn’t been enabled on the template.

Using a regular expression (regex) in fields

There are a few fields within templates that allow you to enter a regex to define the value that your admin can enter in the field; for example "Volume Name" and "Share Name".

A screenshot of using a regex to define the allowed values for a volume name.

As an example, if you enter "^[a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z_]{0,149}$" as the regex for the volume name, it means that "the name should start with an alphabetic character, it can contain only numbers, letters, or the underscore, and it should be 150 or fewer characters in length".

Pass values between template actions

Templates have the ability to use information from a previous action to populate a field in a future action. For example, when defining the name of the volume that will have BlueXP backup and recovery functionality enabled, you can instruct the Backup action to use the value the storage admin entered as the name of the volume from the Create Cloud Volumes ONTAP action.

There are three types of information that the BlueXP remediation service can use:

  • Input value - This is the actual value the storage admin entered into a field in a previous template action.

  • Output value - This is the value BlueXP generates after creating a resource from a previous template action.

  • Enter your own value - This is a value that you enter; it is not accessed from a previous action in the template.

For example, to enable compliance scanning on a volume, the BlueXP classification service needs both the "volume name" that the storage admin enters (the Input value), and the "volume uuid" that BlueXP generates when it creates the volume (the Output value).

The following illustration shows how to enter this information in the BlueXP classification action section of the template.

An illustration showing how to use a value entered in a previous action to populate a field in another action.

Use conditions to perform different actions based on logic statements

Conditions tell the template to execute different actions depending on whether the condition is true or false when the storage admin runs the template. You add a condition by selecting the Logical If action:

A screenshot of how to add conditional statements in your templates.

For example, you may have a guideline that if a volume has a capacity larger than 50 GB then BlueXP backup and recovery is required to be enabled on that volume. If the volume has a smaller capacity, then BlueXP backup and recovery is not enabled. You can implement this in your template as shown below.

A screenshot showing how conditions may be used in your template to conditionally enable BlueXP backup and recovery.

Conditions consist of two parts:

  • Rules - The item you are checking for being either true or false.

  • And/Or statement - Allows you to use multiple rules to further refine whether additional actions are added.

A Rule is made up of three parts:

Source field - The location from which you will get the value to compare.

  • Get input value from action - The actual value the storage admin entered into a field in a previous template action.

  • Get output value from action - The value BlueXP generated after creating a resource from a previous template action.

  • Enter value - This is a value that you enter; it is not accessed from a previous action in the template. This can be a value from a resource that already exists; for example an existing volume.

Operator - The operator used for the comparison. The options are Equal, Not Equal, Greater Than, Less Than, Greater Than or Equal, Less Than or Equal.

Field value - The actual value you are comparing. The options are the same as those for the Source field.

An And/Or statement enables you to conditionally add more actions for users when they run the template based on whether multiple rules are evaluated as True or False. And requires all rules to be true or false, and Or requires just one of the rules needs to be true or false.

When using both an And and Or statement with your rules, the evaluation process follows standard mathematical order where “AND” precedes “OR”. For example:

  • <Rule1> OR <Rule2> AND <Rule3>

    This statement is evaluated in the following order:
    <Rule1> OR (<Rule2> AND <Rule3>)