Dodgy Filter Criteria Logic

AH
Andy Halkyard
Co-operative Group Ltd.

Hi All, 

Wondering if anyone else has this odd problem I noticed this week.

In this example I have two lockdown profiles. One is across the bulk of my estate but I have a new one with extra functionality that I am rolling out in a staggered manner. (for pilots and whatnot).  In order to control that activity i started to use a custom attribute and I set the new profile to apply with the filter criteria myAttrib = "new" and i update the main profile's criteria to myAttrib does not contain "new"

That worked for a while and for a small number of our stores I could just update the attribute at the Device Group level and all the devices in that store would switch profiles.

For main rollout I decided to be clever and use a boolean value as my custom attribute instead. This way I should just scroll through my device groups and click the tickbox to mark as true instead of having to type. (my 13.4 version of mobicontrol doesn't let me set attributes to groups using API, well annoying!).

Now to the problem (for those still reading) - my new profile applies with the criteria myAttrib = true, but the main profile DOES NOT apply with the criteria myAttrib = false !!

This doesn't make any sense to me, I would assume that a boolean attribute unticked must equal false - so therefore device i didn't tick should have that profile, but it literally removed itself from over 6000 devices (which seeing as it was a kiosk mode profile, was officially a BAD THING).

Am I misunderstanding something fundimental here, does anyone else using booleans in filter criteria have this issue?

6 years ago
Android
ANSWERS
AH
Andy Halkyard
6 years ago

Okay - so the very act of typing that problem out has made me realise what the problem actually is. 

Creating a boolean attribute at the top level of Device Groups doesn't actually set ANY value for all the inherited groups. You need to actually click on the boolean then save it - and it THEN propagates down to the rest. So I effectively had 6500 devices with a null value. 

Nothing to see here... <cough>