Sorting and Advanced Filtering

Hi Alex,

To sort by a particular column you need to specify

sortby=[-]<columnName>

Where <columnName> is the column you wish to sort by. e.g.

sortby=downtime

Specifying or omitting a - symbol will change whether the results are ordered ascending or descending. In your posted API call it appears you are only specifying "sort", which is an invalid/incomplete command.

However, it is potentially worth noting that in my experience the PRTG API tends to sort alphabetically, rather than numerically. For example, when sorting by objid, you will get results starting with "1" (10,000, 1,000, etc) before results starting with "2". As such, it may be safer to sort manually once your request has been performed

The documentation regarding messages doesn't apply to you; the "messages" content type refers to object event logs. You are retrieving the "message" _column_, which represents the current message displayed on the object ("OK", etc)

Regards,

lordmilko

Thanks Lordmilko! It looks like postman cut the end of my URL off!

/api/table.json?content=sensors&columns=objid,device,sensor,probe,downtimesince,priority,message&filter_status=5&sortby=downtimesince_raw

I am indeed able to sort by objid but when it comes to downtimesince_raw it doesn't like it. I think it defaults to sorting by messages as you said as its unable to sort by downtime.

The reason I've decided to used downtimesince_raw is because I'm not sure how the api will handle sorting a value where the numbers / letters are not as determinable as a pure count (such as 4 h 36 m).

Maybe this is more of a bug and may require a support case...

PRTG always sorts by the raw value of the property; the non-raw value is simply used for display purposes. As far as interacting with the API goes, you should assume the raw value does not exist - there is no property "downtimesince_raw", only "downtimesince"

I was able to confirm that when sorting by downtimesince, the results are sorted correctly. When sorting by downtimesince_raw, the results were sorted by the first specified column (the default behavior...in this case, objid). One advantage sorting by downtimesinceraw has over properties like objid is that this property is always stored as a 15 digit number, with leading 0's as required. As such, you should be able to expect that PRTG will successfully sort this property numerically, rather than alphabetically

api/table.xml?content=sensors&columns=objid,downtimesince&sortby=downtimesince

Regards,

lordmilko

Thank you for confirming this works. I have realised that there was a URL encoded character between my sortby portion of the query string and the username portion. This was appending to "downtimesince" and therefore not producing the desired effect...

Thanks for your help. Alex.