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Custom Links

Custom links allow users to display arbitrary hyperlinks to external content within Nautobot object views. These are helpful for cross-referencing related records in systems outside of Nautobot. For example, you might create a custom link on the device view which links to the current device in a network monitoring system.

Custom links can be created under the admin UI or web UI located in the navbar under Extensibility > Miscellaneous > Custom Links. Each link is associated with a particular Nautobot object type (location, device, prefix, etc.) and will be displayed on relevant views. Each link is assigned text and a URL, both of which support Jinja2 templating. The text and URL are rendered with the context variable obj representing the current object.

For example, you might define a link like this:

  • Text: View NMS
  • URL: https://nms.example.com/nodes/?name={{ obj.name }}

When viewing a device named Router4, this link would render as:

<a href="https://nms.example.com/nodes/?name=Router4">View NMS</a>

Custom links appear as buttons at the top right corner of the page. When more than one link or group applies to an object, they are collected into a single dropdown menu. A link's button class is applied to its entry in the menu, and to the button itself when only a single link or group applies. Numeric weighting can be used to influence the ordering of links.

Context Data

The following context data is available within the template when rendering a custom link's text or URL.

Variable Description
obj The Nautobot object being displayed
debug A boolean indicating whether debugging is enabled
request The current WSGI request
user The current user (if authenticated)
perms The permissions assigned to the user

All built-in Jinja2 filters are available and it's also possible to develop and register a custom Jinja2 filters.

Conditional Rendering

Only links which render with non-empty text are included on the page. You can employ conditional Jinja2 logic to control the conditions under which a link gets rendered.

For example, if you only want to display a link for active devices, you could set the link text to

{% if obj.status.name == 'Active' %}View NMS{% endif %}

The link will not appear when viewing a device with any status other than "active."

As another example, if you wanted to show only devices belonging to a certain manufacturer, you could do something like this:

{% if obj.device_type.manufacturer.name == 'Cisco' %}View NMS{% endif %}

The link will only appear when viewing a device with a manufacturer name of "Cisco."

Note

To access custom fields of an object within a template, use the cf attribute. For example, {{ obj.cf.color }} will return the value (if any) for the custom field with a key of color on obj.

Group names can be specified to organize links into groups. Links with the same group name will render as a dropdown menu beneath a single button bearing the name of the group. When other links or groups are also present, each group appears as a labeled section within the combined dropdown menu.