Being able to filter on whether a field is empty or null

[OtherSystems]

NetBox version

v2.10.8

Feature type

Change to existing functionality

Proposed functionality

Similar to #4522

Would like to be filter on fields (such as dns_name) to empty or not empty, so get a list of where dns_name is not set or just has anything

Perhaps this could be done with the filter dns_name__null or dns_name__empty and for the reverse dns_name__notempty or dns_name__notnull

For us the syntax wouldn't matter, as long as the functionality is possible.

Use case

we have scripts that operate on dns_name currently we check this with dns_name_ic=. to see if there any to use but that's a bit ugly and not 100% correct.

Checking for empty fields would also be useful for scripts where you want to inform users/admins of incomplete entries, like where someone has forgotten to set the platform or location of a device.

Database changes

No response

External dependencies

No response

[nahun]

I'll add another specific use case for this feature:

I use the dns_name field in NetBox to populate DNS records with a webhook. But since users can still mess with the DNS records outside of netbox, I run an "audit" script daily that takes the data in netbox and updates the DNS records if there were any changes done outside of netbox that conflicts. To do this I pull down all the IP addresses and then filter those with a dns_name set in the code. The query would be much quicker if I could filter IP addresses with a non-null or non-empty dns_name.

[devon-mar]

Filtering by null fields currently works by using null as the value (#2632) but the ability to filter by not null is currently not available.

I tried using dns_name__n=null but it doesn't seem to work due to the current implementation.

[jeremystretch]

I've added a custom empty lookup to address this use case. You can now do e.g. ?dns_name__empty=False to return all records with non-empty values.