How I Roll

I use a mouse or trackpad all day. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate those devices.

But I don’t like repetitive click-click-click workflows, of any kind. Especially in a webpage that has to refresh. Too error prone, too mind-numbing!

Today I had to remove some computers from our Casper JSS that we sold. Yes, I could just click each one and hit delete. Or yes, I could make the appropriate search and then perform an “Action/Delete Comptuers”. But I didn’t write python-jss to click around in a web form!

First I grabbed all of the computers from the lab we sold:

    
    
    ms503 = [j.Computer(computer.id) for computer in j.Computer() if computer.name.upper().startswith("MS503")]
    

Rather than pull the full record for each computer on the JSS, which is costly (time-intensive), I did this preliminary list first. So, it grabbed all computers whose name starts with “MS503”, regardless of case.

We already have new computers in place with duplicate names; thus, the comprehension uses name for the name matching, but pulls the full record using the id property. Otherwise, the JSS returns the first result with that name, even though there may be more than one.

Then I filtered the list down just to the two older-model iMacs which were in the first list:

    
    old_ms503 = [computer for computer in ms503 if computer.findtext("hardware/model").rsplit("(")[1].rstrip(")") in ("Early 2009", "Mid 2007")]

This is admittedly an ugly chain of rsplit/rstrip to get the model name. If it weren’t just for expediency I would probably write a regex to do the job.

From there, it’s a simple:

    
    for computer in old_ms503:
    	computer.delete()

So fresh and so clean!