Pick pinned nodes from a list instead of typing certnames

[eth-man]

Requested from a live installation.

Now

Pinning is a free-text field: web01.example.com, db02.example.com. The operator has to know the exact certname and type it, with no confirmation it matches anything real until after saving.

Wanted

Choose nodes from the estate the console already knows about — search, select, done.

Worth keeping

Pinning a node PuppetDB has not seen yet must remain possible. It is deliberate today, and the field says so:

Pinning a node PuppetDB has not seen yet is allowed — it will materialize once the node reports.

That is a real workflow — pin the machine being provisioned tomorrow — and NodeGroupPin.certname is deliberately a plain column with no foreign key to ManagedNode so it survives that cache being truncated. A picker that only offers known nodes would remove the capability.

So: a picker for the common case, with free text still available for the not-yet-seen case, and unknown entries shown as such rather than rejected.

Acceptance

• Search and select from projected nodes
• Free-entry of an unknown certname still works, and is visibly marked unknown rather than refused
• Already-pinned nodes are not offered twice

[eth-man]

Reinforced from the same live installation, with a scale concern: "if thinking on huge servers list it might be bad idea?"

Right instinct. Two things follow.

Search must be server-side

Never ship the estate to the browser to filter it there. Debounced typeahead against the projected node set, with the result count shown as 12 of 4,300 match so it is obvious the search is authoritative rather than a local slice of a truncated page.

But pinning does not scale, and the UI should say so

Pins are for exceptions — the one box that is special. Membership at scale belongs in rules. A picker that makes pinning 200 nodes comfortable has made the wrong pattern easy.

So the picker should nudge toward the durable version rather than just being faster:

• Pin all matches — search dns, get 12, pin the set in one action. Bridges search and bulk entry.
• Suggest a rule once a pin list grows (~20+). If the pinned set shares a projected fact value, offer it: "these 40 nodes all share os.family = Debian — use a rule instead?" The product noticing what someone is doing by hand and offering the version that keeps working when the estate grows.
• Paste-many keeps working. Sometimes the list comes out of a CMDB and there is nothing to search for.

Unchanged

Pinning a certname PuppetDB has not seen must stay possible and stay marked as unknown rather than refused — see the original description.