Trimming down on OCI CLI output with a query in the RC file

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a command client, which leverages their REST API. One thing you can do to streamline your usage is to make use of an RC file. The RC file that would be automatically used is the one at the path: `~/.oci/oci_cli_rc`, but you can also point to an alternative file path if you have named it something different.

At the most basic level what you would typically want to do is provide some alias for arguments. A common argument being `--compartment-id`, but we can alias that to simply `-c` by specifying in our RC file:

[OCI_CLI_PARAM_ALIASES]
-c = --compartment-id


This is all good, but what I think is neat is that you can provide queries to manipulate the output that is returned to the screen.

What's a use case for this? Well one example, it's not uncommon to list the compartments so you can figure out the compartment ID, but by default there is a lot of information returned that I am almost never interested in. When your tenancy isn't very complex, it's not a problem, but when it starts to get more complex, the last thing you want to do is be scrolling pages of compartment properties you aren't interested in.

So, you define queries in a confiuration section named: [OCI_CLI_CANNED_QUERIES]. So, first lets look at the full output, so we can define which properties we want returned. What I want, and in this order is:

1. Parent compartment ID
2. Compartment ID
3. Name

So, I define my query like:

[OCI_CLI_CANNED_QUERIES]

simple_list=data[*].{"id": "id", "parent-id": "compartment-id", "name": "name"}


With that saved into my RC file, now I can run my list operation and point to by pre-defined query like so:

oci iam compartment list --query query://simple_list

And my output becomes:

[
  {
    "id": "ocid1.compartment.oc1..xxx",
    "name": "education",
    "parent-id": "ocid1.tenancy.oc1..xxx"
  },
  {
    "id": "ocid1.compartment.oc1..xxx",
    "name": "ManagedCompartmentForPaaS",
    "parent-id": "ocid1.tenancy.oc1..xxx"
  },
  {
    "id": "ocid1.compartment.oc1..xxx",
    "name": "terraform",
    "parent-id": "ocid1.tenancy.oc1..xxx"
  }
]


Much more easy to consume, right?

As you can see, the display order doesn't match the way in which I defined the query fields - it looks to come out in alphabetical order, if that matters to you.

This is just one example of what you can do. Other examples in the documentation include:

  • Returning data a simple comma separated list of values
  • Applying a filter - check out Christoph's blog with some advances examples:
  • Restricting output to a number of records

This query leverages the JMESPath technology. 

You can also see the Oracle provided query examples here: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/API/SDKDocs/cliconfigure.htm#SpecifyingNamedQueries

Popular posts from this blog

Installing Oracle Instant Client on Ubuntu

Now that Oracle has enabled us to download instant client without any click through for accepting the license , I wanted to revisit a seamless install of the instant client on a new set up. Ubuntu has the documentation about installing the instant client here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Oracle%20Instant%20Client. First - because Oracle provides their releases in RPM archive format (or a tarball), in order to have an installer you need to create a DEB archive. There is a package in the archives, alien, which aids this process. This gives the start of the script: #!/bin/bash # Install dependencies sudo apt install alien The 3 packages the Ubuntu documentation tells us to retrieve are: - devel - basic (I opt for basiclite instead) - sqlplus So, over at the downloads page: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html we can grab the link. # Download files. Example specific to 19.3 # Some links were not correct on the do...
Read more

Report row buttons firing a dynamic action

Image
A lot of the time on reports of data, we'll define a link column, and specify an image which is the beloved pencil icon. Which is good and all, but looking in the Sample Database Application (packaged application), they have taken a different approach to style links - a button that stretches the width of it's containing cell. So, the UI ends up looking like so: So, is this done? Well first, you define a new column for the placeholder. Suppose I want my link column to be Report, I define an extra column in my query: , 'Report' report_link Then I need to go to my new column's attributes, and change the column type to a link. And, in the link attributes, set the text to what you want displayed. Here, I'm just going to display the value of the new column and point to my desired page. So I set the target page, then also the Link text as #REPORT_LINK#. At this point the report will just show link text, as we expect. So, then to replicate t...
Read more

Customising APEX built-in validation messages

Image
I was working on an application and when trying to save some data, I was getting these error messages despite the fact I had no validations on my page. And what I wanted to know, how do I change these message contents? APEX does some default checking based on entered data. A prime example of this is a date field. On a brand new application, I created a region and added a page item with the type as "Date Picker". If I enter text into the date input field that is not a date conforming to the date format, I will get the following error: "Date Field does not match format DS."   First of all, DS? What is that? This particular application was created by uploading a spreadsheet, and I did not set that. In fact, my spreadsheet had no date data to begin with. In saying that, a quick search in the globalization attributes, and somehow this application has the date format set to "DS". So first, let us change that - I like to use DD-MON-YYYY. So that fixes the error ...
Read more