18.7.9-amd64 GUI firewall - aliases mising description field

[skyroute]

Hello OPNsese community.
Could some one advise me if what I am experiencing is a bug in a GUI or software is functioning as designed.
I am running OPNsense 18.7.9-amd64 and it appears that I do not have an option for description field when creating an host type of alias.
I have looked at the wiki pages for OPNsense, and there is a different looking GUI elements with description field present for host(s) type of alias, while my actual instance of OPNses completely missing that option all together.

Please see screen-shots attached.   

[franco]

Hi,

This has been an intentional change in 18.7 to increase performance in the alias model and its new API support. We tried to weigh options and replacements but there was no practical solution to the problem.


Cheers,
Franco

[RGijsen]

Was there actually a problem with performance then? We are considering moving from pfSense, but this would certainly be a deal-breaker. Missing seperator lines in the firewall rules being the other.

[franco]

The alias field is flat <value>1 2 3 4 5</value> and descriptions were parallel flat <description>desc1 desc2 desc3 desc4 desc5</description> which makes no sense for robustness of data modelling and speed in UI processing later on.

We decided to keep the value flat, which required to drop the individual description.

I'm recommending to stay on pfSense for the reasons you mentioned.


Cheers,
Franco