Partial Search is a search API available on Chef Server. (see Notes below for version compatibility) It can be used to reduce the network bandwidth and the memory used by chef-client to process search results.

This cookbook provides an experimental interface to the partial search API by providing a partial_search method that can be used instead of the search method in your recipes.

The partial_search method allows you to retrieve just the attributes of interest. For example, you can execute a search to return just the name and IP addresses of the nodes in your infrastructure rather than receiving an array of complete node objects and post-processing them.

Chef Client 12.0 shipped with the partial_search capability built-in so there is no longer a need to use this cookbook.

Upload this cookbook and include it in the dependencies of any cookbook where you would like to use partial_search.

When you call partial_search, you need to specify the key paths of the attributes you want returned. Key paths are specified as an array of strings. Each key path is mapped to a short name of your choosing. Consider the following example:

partial_search(:node, 'role:web',
   :keys => { 'name' => [ 'name' ],
              'ip'   => [ 'ipaddress' ],
              'kernel_version' => [ 'kernel', 'version' ]
            }
).each do |result|
  puts result['name']
  puts result['ip']
  puts result['kernel_version']
end

In the example above, two attributes will be extracted (on the server) from the nodes that match the search query. The result will be a simple hash with keys 'name' and 'ip'.

• We would like your feedback on this feature and the interface provided by this cookbook. Please send comments to the chef-dev mailing list.

• The partial search API is available in the Open Source Chef Server since 11.0.4

• The partial search API is available in Enterprise Chef Server since 1.2.2

• Author:: Adam Jacob (adam@chef.io)
• Author:: John Keiser (jkeiser@chef.io)

Copyright:: 2012-2015, Chef Software, Inc.

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