chrisarcand/miq_group_filters.md Secret

## miq_group_filters.md

      
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              miq_group_filters.md
            
          
    So I ran into a lovely issue while porting MiqGroup#filters (text blob, serialized hash) to Entitlement filter columns
(Postgres Array columns, divided): Postgres multidimensional arrays must be of equal length.
The problem with this is that we currently store filters like this:
[["/managed/environment/dev"],
 ["/managed/location/chicago", "/managed/location/london"],
 ["/managed/prov_max_cpu/1"],
 ["/managed/service_level/gold"]]

I was originally going to leave the format as is because it affects too much to change it.
But now I realize I can't do that (at least, not without just porting over a serialized text blob).
The current format is pretty fragile, plus with multiple columns now the prefixes (i.e. /managed/) are pointless.
Maybe we should port this to a JSON column, an excellent tool for 'tagging'.
Then...
{ "environment":   ["dev"],
  "location":      ["chicago", "london"],
  "service_level": ["gold"] }
Problems:

These are just filters, not the actual tags themselves...so I'm guessing tags elsewhere will have to be changed.
That could be a very, very large undertaking.
My example is just for tag_filters ("managed" filters); I can't really deduce what the format is for 'belongsto' yet.
I'm guessing it could work similarly.

Ultimately, we must do tagging in a better way now IMO, as the next step is for ✨ Multiple entitlements ✨ which need to be able to make sense of 'merging' filters. (Right?)