A More Meaningful Representation for Cable ObjectVar

[ctsalidis]

Hi community,

I am having an issue with Netbox. In the custom script, I created a Cable ObjectVar that retrieves all the cables of the selected devices. However, in the dropdown menu, I only see the ID of the cables. Is there a way to fix this? This representation is not helpful.

# Select a cable 
cable = MultiObjectVar(model=Cable, label="Existing Connection",description="Select an existing connection, where the service will be deployed", query_params={"device_id": "$devices"}, required= False)

I suppose there's an option to modify Cable.str, but that would be a global modification affecting other scripts as well. Is there another way to make this change only for one script?

Thank you!

[ctsalidis]

Hi @pheus, do you have any ideas about this topic? Is there any good workaround?

[pheus]

Hey there,

I haven’t worked with exactly this use case before, so I’m not entirely sure what output you’re hoping to see in the UI. Could you clarify what kind of information you'd like displayed for each cable?

From the model perspective, a Cable object in NetBox mostly just has an ID and attributes like length. As you may have noticed, if a label is set on the cable, it will be used as the display name in the dropdown.

If you're looking for more context — like where the cable is connected — you might want to look into the CableTermination model. It provides more detailed information about each end of the cable, which might better suit your use case.

That said, I don’t believe there’s currently a way to customize how the cable is represented in the Custom Script UI without changing the global __str__() method on the Cable model, which as you mentioned would affect other parts of the system.

Sorry I can’t provide a more direct solution, but I hope this gives you some useful directions to explore!

[ctsalidis]

@pheus Thank you for the feedback. I am looking for more context, similar to the following example:

Switch_A Port_A ↔ Switch_B Port_B.

The cable model provides all this information. However, I am not sure if there is currently a good solution in Netbox to create an ObjectVar that will show up in a custom script presenting all this information.

[pheus]

You're right — the Cable model does contain the information needed to construct something like:

Switch_A Port_A ↔ Switch_B Port_B

However, the terminations themselves aren't stored directly on the Cable model. Instead, they're accessed via the CableTermination class. That said, the Cable model does provide helper methods to retrieve the terminations, so the data is accessible, just not directly embedded.

You could try working with the CableTermination class in your script to get more detailed representations, though integrating that cleanly into the ObjectVar UI might be a challenge.

If you'd like to see this kind of contextual string (e.g., DeviceA PortA ↔ DeviceB PortB) as the default representation of a cable, it might be worth opening a feature request to extend the __str__() method for the Cable model to include this.

Hope this helps!

[ctsalidis]

@pheus another option is to use the cable information to populate the cable label with such a format.