Is there any way at all to search facts with a ^?

singularity001 · January 12, 2026, 4:03pm

We constantly need to be able to search facts on a large basis, and many of them. But there seems to be no way to search for multiple facts using ^.

eg;

facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-7d9b2342-c4ca-4e48-b0cd-841ab5ab1795 or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-8f18b28d-8b87-46e9-9015-31002a7a84b0 or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-dba26e34-cd9d-482b-b0a2-9c1709eebcfa or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-f69e7502-e5c8-4caf-98f5-104c4c25489d or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-f500a2ae-44d6-4e9e-9e87-76a60db1d4c4 or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-c3044f87-be6c-4a7f-8c07-66bbdc5ce88a or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-5aa1224d-6930-488b-82ab-04602d6eadee or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-0ed04ce2-ed87-4cdd-8b02-4dbe5fab27eb or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-dcb11f45-e907-4380-86b3-8aab929c41be or facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id = subproject-4c6680c3-1589-4af0-aeca-3847ce406e30

Where as we would just like to be able to use
facts.ssnc_cloud_subproject_id ^ (a,b,c,d,e,f,g)

Where a,b,c,d,etc are the fact values.

I’ve tried so many different ways to do this, and can never find a way that works.

ochnerd · January 13, 2026, 7:51am

Foreman uses scoped_search GitHub - wvanbergen/scoped_search: Easily search you ActiveRecord models with a simple query language that converts to SQL. , if I remember correctly.

It seems you would need the OR operator.

ochnerd · January 13, 2026, 7:53am

Oh my bad Query language · wvanbergen/scoped_search Wiki · GitHub ^ is mentioned on the list of operators

jeremylenz · January 13, 2026, 5:21pm

The problem is that facts search uses an “external method” which is a way to accomplish more complex searches:

github.com/theforeman/foreman

app/models/fact_value.rb

develop


      
          
          has_one :parent_fact_name, :through => :fact_name, :source => :parent, :class_name => 'FactName'
          
          has_one :location, :through => :host
          scoped_search :relation => :location, :on => :name, :rename => :location, :complete_value => true, :only_explicit => true
          scoped_search :relation => :host, :on => :location_id, :rename => :location_id, :complete_enabled => false, :only_explicit => true, :validator => ScopedSearch::Validators::INTEGER
          has_one :organization, :through => :host
          scoped_search :relation => :organization, :on => :name, :rename => :organization, :complete_value => true, :only_explicit => true
          scoped_search :relation => :host, :on => :organization_id, :rename => :organization_id, :complete_enabled => false, :only_explicit => true, :validator => ScopedSearch::Validators::INTEGER
          
          scoped_search :on => :value, :in_key => :fact_name, :on_key => :name, :rename => :facts, :complete_value => true, :only_explicit => true, :ext_method => :search_cast_facts
          scoped_search :on => :value, :default_order => true, :ext_method => :search_value_cast_facts
          scoped_search :on => :updated_at, :rename => :reported_at, :only_explicit => true, :complete_value => true
          scoped_search :on => :host_id, :only_explicit => true, :complete_value => false
          
          scoped_search :relation => :fact_name, :on => :name, :complete_value => true, :aliases => ["fact"]
          scoped_search :relation => :host,      :on => :name, :complete_value => true, :rename => :host, :ext_method => :search_by_host_or_hostgroup, :only_explicit => true
          scoped_search :relation => :hostgroup, :on => :name, :complete_value => true, :rename => :"host.hostgroup", :ext_method => :search_by_host_or_hostgroup, :only_explicit => true
          scoped_search :relation => :fact_name, :on => :short_name, :complete_value => true, :aliases => ["fact_short_name"]
          scoped_search :relation => :fact_name, :on => :type, :complete_value => false, :only_explicit => true, :aliases => ["origin"]

I don’t have full knowledge of the fact scoped_search architecture, but since fact names and fact values are stored in separate tables, I imagine this complicates things quite a bit.

singularity001 · January 14, 2026, 1:13am

Well, time to find out the limit of OR’s we can have. Currently we are at 390, for a single filter on a role. I feel like Im pushing Foreman further than anyone really has. Its been interesting. We are currently at 80,000 hosts, running around 1.5 million jobs a day, with grains being uploaded each time, as well as a Salt report.

singularity001 · January 16, 2026, 3:24pm

Follow up question. Can anyone think of how to speed up fact searching for user roles?
We are trying to limit users by a certain fact. However, there are 190-350 of them. Currently it takes about 35-45 seconds to load a page because we have 80,000 hosts with some 50-150 facts per host. That obviously is not useable. So we thought - ok what if we add a smart parameter to each host and then use that as a role filter. We were hoping we could use ^ with smart params, but again we must use 1 or 2 or 3 or …. 300 or 301 - So again not ideal for searching/filtering purposes but it did reduce the page loads from 30-45 seconds per load, to around 8-10 seconds. Still not ideal, but better.

Can anyone else think of a better way to handle this, or anything else we could do to speed things up? All storage is on SSDs with 25Gb links between them.