[Engine-devel] UI Plugins: PoC patch revision 7 is here

[Vojtech Szocs]

Hi Itamar,

UI plugin infrastructure translates internal business entities into JSON-like representations and passes those representations to UI plugins. (Internal entities are NOT exposed to UI plugins directly.)

Currently, all entities supported by UI plugin infrastructure (as per org.ovirt.engine.ui.webadmin.plugin.entity.EntityType) are transformed into following representation:

{ entityId: "[BusinessEntityGuidAsString]" }

For example, a VM entity with entity ID "vm123" will translate to:

{ entityId: "vm123" }

Translation is currently based on org.ovirt.engine.core.common.businessentities.BusinessEntity interface, like so: "BusinessEntity<? extends NGuid>" (we expect ID type parameter to be NGuid-compatible). However, I've found that there are some entities (like Pool - org.ovirt.engine.core.common.businessentities.vm_pools) that don't implement BusinessEntity interface.

Quick question to backend folks - IIRC all entities extend org.ovirt.engine.core.common.businessentities.IVdcQueryable, but not all entities implement org.ovirt.engine.core.common.businessentities.BusinessEntity interface. What is the precise relation between IVdcQueryable and BusinessEntity?

As for UI plugins, currently all entities get translated to above mentioned basic JSON-like representation. You can see the relevant code in org.ovirt.engine.ui.webadmin.plugin.entity.BaseEntity.from() static method. There's a TODO that says "make this class [BaseEntity] abstract and create specific entity for each EntityType" - this means we are planning to extend the above mentioned basic JSON-like representation for different entity types.

For example, for a VM entity we might do:

{ entityId: "[BusinessEntityGuidAsString]", osType: "[VmOsType]" }

Vojtech


----- Original Message -----
From: "Itamar Heim" <iheim at redhat.com>
To: "Vojtech Szocs" <vszocs at redhat.com>
Cc: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2012 5:24:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Engine-devel] UI Plugins: PoC patch revision 7 is here

On 11/16/2012 06:08 PM, Vojtech Szocs wrote:
>> is there a clear list of all APIs supported now?
>
> Not yet, unfortunately, this should be part of "for plugin developers" wiki that is planned to be written in upcoming weeks.

i just wanted to review how we solved not using internal entities as 
part of the API