Complex Filtering

Warning

This feature is in tech-preview. It may change in significant ways in the future.

In addition to the usual querystring filters, Pulp provides a special q filter, that allows you to combine other filters with NOT, AND and OR operations.

Warning

In order to prevent arbitrarily complex queries, the maximum complexity of the expressions explained below is limited to 8. See the examples below for how complexity is calculated.

For a given list endpoint, all the other existing (non ordering) filters can be used in these expressions.

The grammar, given sufficient whitespace to tokenize, is basically:

EXPRESSION = FILTER_EXPR | NOT_EXPR | AND_EXPR | OR_EXPR | "(" EXPRESSION ")"
NOT_EXPR = "NOT" EXPRESSION
AND_EXPRESSION = EXPRESSION "AND" EXPRESSION
OR_EXPRESSION = EXPRESSION "OR" EXPRESSION
FILTER_EXPRESSION = FILTERNAME "=" STRING
STRING = SIMPLE_STRING | QUOTED_STRING

Some example q expressions and their complexity are:

pulp_type__in='core.rbac'
# complexity: 1 = 1 (filter expression)

NOT pulp_type="core.rbac"
# complexity: 2 = 1 (NOT) + 1 (filter expression)

pulp_type__in=core.rbac,core.content_redirect
# complexity: 1 = 1 (filter expression)

pulp_type="core.rbac" OR pulp_type="core.content_redirect"
pulp_type="core.rbac" AND name__contains=GGGG
pulp_type="core.rbac" AND name__iexact=gGgG
pulp_type="core.rbac" AND name__contains="naïve"
# complexity: 3 = 1 (AND/OR) + 2 (filter expression)

pulp_type="core.rbac" AND name__icontains=gg AND NOT name__contains=HH
# complexity: 5 = 1 (AND/OR) + 1 (NOT) + 3 (filter expression)

NOT (pulp_type="core.rbac" AND name__icontains=gGgG)
pulp_type="core.rbac" AND NOT name__contains="naïve"
# complexity: 4 = 1 (AND/OR) + 1 (NOT) + 2 (filter expression)

pulp_type="core.rbac" AND(   name__icontains=gh OR name__contains="naïve")
# complexity: 5 = 2 (AND/OR) + 3 (filter expression)

pulp_type="core.rbac" OR name__icontains=gh OR name__contains="naïve"
# complexity: 4 = 1 (AND/OR) + 3 (filter expression)