What I'd like to be able to do is specify the following groupby resource.name.substring(0,3) resource.type.plugin = JBossAS resource.type.name = JBossAS Server which would return me a set of groups where each group contains JBAS instances whose names started with the same three characters. This would be useful in environments where strong naming conventions are used and people want to group together resources which have similar, but not identical names. Could potentially use a regex method instead that relied on matching capturing groups, e.g. a potentially more flexible version of first example groupby resource.name.regex("^(.{3})") resource.type.plugin = JBossAS resource.type.name = JBossAS Server ^(.{3}) is meant to capture the first 3 characters of the name (pseudo-regex :-)) , this could be evaluated for every resource then those resources with the same capture would be put in the same group.
This bug was previously known as http://jira.rhq-project.org/browse/RHQ-2135