Cloning of device attribute to another (one, many, but not ALL as in device recipe)

Feature Request
1

Greetings. If not already, it would be a good suggestion to be able to Clone a single device’s attribute(s) individually (not as a whole ‘recipe’) to other device(s). There are many attributes, during development, that one find needing in another at a later time and, depending on development case, have to ‘duplicate’ manually from device to device during said development. Just a :thought_balloon: . :red_circle:

2

Is your use case something you could accomplish with our Bulk Device Update feature?

3

@Dylan_Schuster , thanks for the reply - if I’m not mistaken, the Bulk Device Update feature is very close; it will let you add/remove/etc attributes to more than one device ‘from scratch’. But can I simply ‘clone’ an existing attribute of a device to another, for example (:warning: illustration purpose only, not found on Losant…yet :smiley: …):
image
Maybe an ‘addition’ to the Bulk feature… :red_circle:

1 Like
4

I see what you mean. You are right, that is not directly supported by the bulk device update feature.

While you could put the steps into a workflow to, say, get the attribute object out of the source device and then add it to another device, I think it would be a better use of your time to just manually do the cloning in this case. But I’ll make a request for a feature that would get you what you’re after - whether it’s cloning an attribute from one device to another or some other sort of “attribute template” feature. Thanks for the input.

1 Like
5

Awesome, thanks :+1: :red_circle:

6

We often run into case where we add attributes to the device recipe and then want to update existing devices to use the new attributes. It’s a pain especially with attribute tags.

It would be ideal to have a way to clone attributes from device recipes as well. Or even an option to update a device to match another device or a device recipe.

7

I agree; this is a request we got somewhat frequently. I will add your +1 to it.

In the meantime, are you aware of our bulk device update feature? If you’ve left the “DeviceRecipe” tag on devices created from the recipe, it would be simple to target the devices that were created from the recipe and add new attributes through this tool. That is the best workaround I can propose in the meantime.

8

I am familiar with the device bulk update and have been using it.

Although it works good, it’s not ideal as I still have to copy all the attributes and their tags and could make a mistake. We do leave the DeviceRecipe tag on all our devices.

We tend to have the device recipe be the truth for all our devices. Although in some cases we modify attribute tags to customize per device sometimes.

1 Like
9

Thanks for raising this. Cloning individual attributes across devices would indeed be a great addition. While the bulk update feature helps, having a straightforward cloning option would save a lot of time and reduce errors. I support this feature request. But for now, manually cloning attributes seems to be the best work around, but an ‘attribute template’ feature would be ideal.

Thanks for considering this.