We are migrating from RemoteDesktopManager to Royal TS, and one feature what we feel is missing is sub connections.
For example, instead of having many entries for a host (SSH, HTTPS, HTTP, other ports) it would be great if there was an ability to create sub connections that can inherit some properties from the parent host (i.e. credentials) or using macros (like the $PARENT_HOST$, $PARENT_NAME$, $PARENT_HOST_WITHOUT_DOMAIN$ etc.) with them.
Thanks for the suggestion!
What you’re describing sounds very similar to what connection templates already provide today. Templates are essentially “special” connections that let you define shared settings and even derive new or ad-hoc connections dynamically based on existing ones.
For example, you can define a template once and then:
create new connections pre-populated with those settings, or
generate ad-hoc connections where values (like hostnames) are injected from another connection
This approach usually covers the “sub-connection” use case without introducing an additional hierarchy or relationship model.
You might want to take a look at this blog post which explains the concept and some practical examples:
https://www.royalapps.com/blog/new-feature-templates
Curious if that would already solve your scenario, or if there’s something specific missing?
Also, we’re currently working on Royal Connect, which introduces some additional approaches to achieve similar behavior based on folders. It’s still early days though, so a bit too soon to go into details here.
That may cover some of the things we are used to with RDM, I will have to try that out once we have sorted out our import problems (have an active case about that)!
For example, we have a storage system that has four nodes and a shared VIP, where we have web interface and SSH to the different things. This is covered by a main connection with HTTPS and sub connections to each node with their own IP via SSH, and a SSH entry to the main host. I would in this case need to make a template for each node, and that template will be visible for all hosts I need to connect to, making that list very long with many systems that I need to add there.
I’ll just have to play around with it a bit, I guess when starting from scratch the Template option in RTS will be more usefull than when importing existing entries!
EDIT: Since some of our hostnames uses FQDN, we would need to strip parts of the FQDN to work with templates (hence us using the $PARENT_HOST_WITHOUT_DOMAIN$ in RDM). Is there any support in RTS for this, or is it only $URI$ we can use?
At the moment we only have $URI$ to refer to a host/IP address of a connection object.