Filtering Lists
Every list in FOG — hosts, images, snapins, tasks, reports, the association tabs inside an edit page, and the lists a plugin adds — carries two ways to narrow what it shows.
The search box above the list is a quick free-text match: type anything and FOG returns rows where any column contains it. It is the fastest way to find one thing you can already name.
The Filter button, next to Select All and Refresh, is for everything else. It builds a filter one rule at a time, and each rule names a single column.
The Column search button beside it is the same thing in a different shape: a row of boxes under the column headings, one per column, so you can type straight under the heading you mean. Use whichever suits the job — a quick “host name starts with lab” is faster in the header row, while anything with brackets or an Or in it wants the Filter panel.
Building a filter
Click Filter, then Add condition. A rule has three parts:
- the column to look at,
- the condition to apply,
- the value to compare against.
Add more rules to narrow further. The And / Or control to the left of the rules decides how they combine: And keeps only the rows matching every rule, Or keeps the rows matching any of them. Add group nests a set of rules inside brackets, so you can express things like “deployed this month, and called either lab-a or lab-b”.
The button counts the rules you have added, so Filter (2) means two are
active. Clear All removes them.
Note
The filter and the search box work together — with both in use, a row has to satisfy the search and the filter. If a list looks emptier than you expect, check both.
The conditions you get depend on the column
FOG knows what each column really holds, and offers only the conditions that make sense for it.
| Kind of column | Examples | Conditions offered |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Host name, image name, description | Equals, Not, Starts With, Ends With, Contains, Does Not Contain, Empty, Not Empty |
| Number | ID, size, port | Equals, Not, <, <=, >=, >, Between, Not Between, Empty, Not Empty |
| Date and time | Last deployed, last seen, created, checked in | Equals, Not, Before, After, Between, Not Between, Empty, Not Empty |
A few columns cannot be filtered on and are simply not listed as choices. Two kinds: values FOG never sends to the browser in the first place (a host’s security token, for instance), and columns the list calculates rather than stores — a group’s member count, or a site’s host count. There is nothing in the database for a rule to match against.
Note
The list of choices comes from the server, so a plugin’s own lists get the right conditions for their own columns with nothing to configure.
Filtering by date
Date conditions open a calendar. Pick a day rather than typing one, and note that a date condition always means the whole of that day:
- Equals 2026-08-29 — anything that happened at any time on the 29th.
- Before 2026-08-29 — anything up to midnight starting the 29th. The 29th itself is not included.
- After 2026-08-29 — anything from midnight starting the 30th. The 29th itself is not included.
- Between 2026-08-01 and 2026-08-31 — both days included, in full.
Empty and Not Empty are the ones worth knowing about. A date column is empty when the thing has never happened: a host that has never been deployed has no deploy date at all, which is a different fact from having an old one. Those rows are excluded from Before and After — asking for “deployed before today” gives you hosts that were deployed, and not the ones that never were. Use Empty when the never-happened rows are what you are looking for.
Searching under the column headings
Click Column search and a row of boxes appears beneath the headings. Each
box has a small picker to its left choosing how to match, and the choices are
the same ones the Filter panel offers for that column — so a text column can
do has (contains), is (exactly), a… (starts with), …z (ends with) and
their negatives, a number column gets the comparisons, and a date column gets
on, before, after, not on and never. Hover a choice to see its full
name.
Typing filters as you go. On a date column the box is a date picker, and on
empty / never / set the box switches off, because those conditions have
nothing to compare against.
Boxes on several columns combine with And — every box you fill narrows the list further. They also combine with the Filter panel and with the search box, so a row has to satisfy all three.
Note
Turning Column search off clears the boxes as well as hiding them. That is deliberate: a filter you cannot see looks exactly like missing data.
Columns that cannot be filtered get no box, the same ones and for the same reasons as in the Filter panel. Narrow columns put the picker above the box rather than beside it; you can drag a column wider if you would rather have them on one line.
Exporting what you filtered
On the pages that offer a CSV (All) button, the export follows the filter. Whatever the list is showing when you click it is what the file contains — every matching row, not just the page on screen.
Note
The other toolbar buttons — Copy, CSV, Excel, Print — are the browser’s own and can only see the rows it is currently holding, which on a long list is one page. CSV (All) is the one that asks the server for the whole result.
Wildcards
You do not need them, and they are not interpreted. The condition itself says
where the match may fall, so Contains already means “anywhere”. A % or _
typed into a filter value is treated as that character — searching for 50%
finds the text 50%.
The free-text search box above the list behaves differently and is deliberately looser.