On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 12:10:04PM -0800, David Lutterkort wrote:
In practical terms, the blob of data should be passed to the 'start VM' call base64 encoded, and RHEV-M should decode it just before putting it into its proper place.
This requirement is not clear, why not just pass data as 'binary' to 'start vm' and vdsm would write as is into the file, REST already knows how to encode/decode.
I mostly mentioned base64 because that's how other API's (EC2, RAX) encode6 this data; to be pedantic, it's not REST that determines the encoding, but how the request payload is serialized (XML, JSON, application/x-www-form-urlencoded ..) The nice thing about base64 is that it works with all of them, without requiring add'l encoding, but ultimately anything works that allows passing arbitrary binary blobs as user_data.
But base64 is the additional encoding... I'm generally reluctant to intorduce an application-level encoding if the transport already has one. Does any REST serializer have a problem with natively chewing binary data (I really do not know)? Dan.