Using Odyssey Wizard Display Strings

This article describes how to use the Odyssey Wizard display string feature to enhance Odyssey actions and show additional information in the wizard results screen.

What is a Wizard Action Display String?

In the screenshot below you will see an Odyssey Wizard that has been run. It has checked the status, endpoint version and the drive space on the Endpoints in the list. In the area highlighted by the red loop you can see that some of the actions have returned information into the Wizard cells. For example, the version cell shows 41128 and the disk space check show a number of Kb available.

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The data show in the cells is determined by the Display String setting for each Wizard Action.

Editing the Display String

When editing an Odyssey Wizard action you can configure the Display String setting on the Advanced option step of the edit dialog.

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There first field is a regular expression string,

The second field determines which lines in the output the regular expression is evaluated against,

We'll take a look at both of these fields in more detail.

The "Extracted From" Field

Possible values for this field are

All Output
Last Line

Value	Notes
All Output	1. Each line of output is matched against the regular expression individually; therefore multi-line regular expressions will not work. 2. The regular expression will evaluate against each line of output until it finds a successful match, then evaluation will stop. In other words, if more than one line in the output matches the expression only the first of these will be used for the display string.
Last Line	1. This will only attempt to match the regular expression against the last line in the output, this does not include line that are empty or contain only space characters.

Value

Notes

All Output

1. Each line of output is matched against the regular expression individually; therefore multi-line regular expressions will not work.
2. The regular expression will evaluate against each line of output until it finds a successful match, then evaluation will stop. In other words, if more than one line in the output matches the expression only the first of these will be used for the display string.

Last Line

1. This will only attempt to match the regular expression against the last line in the output, this does not include line that are empty or contain only space characters.

The Display String Regular Expression

Odyssey will attempt to match the given regular expression against each line of output specified by the Extracted From field value.

The regular expression has to be found somewhere within the line but doesn't necessarily have to match the whole line exactly. For example,

Display String Setting	Sample Line	Match Result	Display String Output
G.*	Red, Green, Blue	Green, Blue	Green, Blue
.Green.	Red, Green, Blue	Red, Green, Blue	Red, Green, Blue

If you want Display String to show only part of the Match Result then you will need to enclose the part to capture in round brackets. Note that if you have more than one section enclosed in round brackets only the last one will be used for the display string.

Display String Setting	Sample Line	Match Result	Display String Output
Red, (.*), Blue	Red, Green, Blue	Red, Green, Blue	Green
(.), (.), Blue	Red, Green, Blue	Red, Green, Blue	Green

Basic Expressions

The allowable regular expressions follow the Java standards. We will explore some of the most common options here but for full details please refer to the documentation on the Sun website:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html#sum

Some of the common match expressions:

Expression	Matches
.	Any character
X*	X, zero or more times
X+	X, one or more times
X?	X, once or not at all
.*	Any character, zero or more times
\d	A digit [0-9]
\D	A non-digit
\s	A whitespace character
\S	A non-whitespace character
\w	A word character [a-zA-Z_0-9]
\W	A non-word character
\.	A dot/period character "."
\\	The backslash character
\t	A tab character
^	Beginning of a line
$	End of a line

Display String Setting	Sample Line	Match Result	Display String Output
\w+, \w+, (\w+)	Red, Green, Blue	Red, Green, Blue	Blue
\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+	IP Address is 10.168.112.11	10.168.112.11	10.168.112.11

Character Groups

To specify one of a particular group of characters use square brackets:

Expression	Matches
[abc]	a, b or c
[^abc]	Any character except a, b or c
[a-z]	Any character between a and z

Display String Setting	Sample Line	Match Result	Display String Output
Drive [CDE]: (.*)	Drive D: 10Gb	Drive D: 10Gb	10Gb

Logical Group

To specify one of a list of values to look for you can use round brackets and the "|" operator. Note that Odyssey also uses round brackets to determine which part of an expression to use as a display string. It can be useful to switch this interpretation off by adding "?:".

Expression	Matches
(X\|Y)	Either X or Y
(?:X\|Y)	Either X or Y, switching off Display String interpretation of these round brackets

Display String Setting	Sample Line	Match Result	Display String Output
(UK\|FR\|IT).*	FR012345	FR012345	FR
(UK\|FR\|IT)(.*)	FR012345	FR012345	012345
(?:UK\|FR\|IT).*	FR012345	FR012345	FR012345

Case Insensitivity

Case insensitive matching can be specified by starting the regular expression with (?i).

Flag	Behaviour
(?i)	Case insensitive matching

Display String Setting	Sample Line	Match Result	Display String Output
(?i)b\S*	Quick Brown Fox	Brown	Brown
(?i)b\S*	quick brown fox	brown	brown

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