How Filters Affect the Population of a Container

After your application has created a filter with one or more tokens defined in it, the filter can be applied to a container. For a filter to affect how the container is populated, the container must support the filter's type. If the container does not support the filter's type, the filter will simply be ignored when populating the container.

Multiple filters can be applied to a container. For example, your application can apply a SITE_FILTER, a MACHINE_FILTER, and a GROUP_FILTER to a site container. However, multiple filters of the same type cannot be applied to a container. For example, two filters of type SITE_FILTER cannot be applied to a single site container.

Note that not all filters may affect the top-level folders retrieved in a container. Some filters may have no effect on the top-level folders, but will affect subfolders or scalars. For example, when a MACHINE_FILTER and a GROUP_FILTER are applied to a machine container, the MACHINE_FILTER determines the machine folders retrieved at the top level of the container, and the GROUP_FILTER determines the group folders contained within each machine folder. The SmsDescribeFolder function enables your application to retrieve a list of all filter types that act directly on a specified folder or container type.