I am trying to deploy Virtual Machines from a template into a vApp using the vCloud rest API. I feel that there should be a way to configure a vm as I am spawning it (Since the UI seems to do that) but haven't found a way.
I've been focusing my efforts on recomposing a vApp to add a vm to it. The below example will add a vm but I haven't figured out to configure the vm until after it has been created. Specifically I want to set the VM Name, host name, and IP settings of the vm.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<RecomposeVAppParams
xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5"
xmlns:ovf="http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/envelope/1">
<SourcedItem sourceDelete="false">
<Source href="templateUri" />
</SourcedItem>
<AllEULAsAccepted>true</AllEULAsAccepted>
</RecomposeVAppParams>
After the vm is created I can reconfigure it but neither the network settings or host name actually change. The vCloud Director UI tells me they have changed but looking on the guest os shows that the settings have not changed.
Change host name example (doesn't work):
<vcloud:GuestCustomizationSection
xmlns:ovf="http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/envelope/1"
xmlns:vcloud="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5"
href="vmUri/guestCustomizationSection/"
ovf:required="false"
type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.guestCustomizationSection+xml">
<ovf:Info>Specifies Guest OS Customization Settings</ovf:Info>
<vcloud:ComputerName>newName</vcloud:ComputerName>
</vcloud:GuestCustomizationSection>
Has anyone been able to configure a VM as you deploy it. Otherwise does anyone know how to effectively configure settings of a VM after it has been deployed. Working XML examples would be amazing but I would still appreciate help in other forms.
The closest I have been able to come to this is to deploy a vApp from a catalog somewhat customizing it in the process. This is not exactly what you asked for, but I hope it helps.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<InstantiateVAppTemplateParams
xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5"
xmlns:ovf="http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/envelope/1"
name="<MyVappName"
deploy="false"
powerOn="false">
<Description>vApp I deployed through REST API...</Description>
<InstantiationParams>
<NetworkConfigSection>
<ovf:Info>Configuration parameters for logical networks</ovf:Info>
<NetworkConfig networkName="App-Network-1">
<Configuration>
<ParentNetwork href="https://vcd-url/api/network/331a8ee3-33fd-4e4a-878e-1a6dce772fea" />
<FenceMode>bridged</FenceMode>
</Configuration>
</NetworkConfig>
</NetworkConfigSection>
</InstantiationParams>
<Source
href="https://vcd-url/api/vAppTemplate/vappTemplate-d11de298-3041-2ae2-5e81-3ac2b4255423" />
</InstantiateVAppTemplateParams>
Just use the SDK for this task. Download the example and the library. Add the library to proj and call function from there. The SDK has already and Utility library that handle the http communication with the vcloud creating the requests and serve the answers using serialization.
If you really want to do the request by yourself you just run the example in SDK put Fiddler to spy the communication and get the exact request and reproduce it.
I know because first time I have started making http request using the documentation and get in trouble.
Related
I would like to accesss the sitecore DB and items from console application like
Sitecore.Data.Database db = Sitecore.Context.Database
or
Sitecore.Data.Database db = Sitecore.Data.Database.GetDatabase("master")
how do I configure and setup my console application to access the DB as above?
Thanks Everyone for the suggestion, I am really interested in config changes, I used webservice, but it has very limited methods. For example, if I would like create an Item with the template and insert the item with prepopulated value, there is no such option. The reason I am looking for the console apporach is I would like to import the contents from XML or excel sheet and push those to the sitecore tree, eventually use the scheduled task to run the console app periodically. I do not want to copy the entire web.config and app_config. If anyone has already done this, could you please post your steps and necessary config changes?
You have two options I think:
1) Import the Sitecore bits of a website's web.config into your console application's app.config, so that the Sitecore API "just works"
I'm sure I read a blog post about this, but I can't find the reference right now. (I will have another look) But I think the simple but long winded approach is to copy all of the <sitecore/> element and all the separate files it references. I'm fairly sure you can whittle this down to a subset of the config required for data access with a bit of thinking.
2) Don't use the Sitecore API directly, connect to a web service that exposes access to it remotely.
There are a few of these that already exist. Sitecore itself exposes one, Sitecore Rocks has one, and Hedgehog TDS has one too. And you can always write your own (since any web service running inside the Sitecore ASP.Net app can make database calls and report values back and forth - just remember to consider security if this web service might end up exposed externally for any reason)
John West links to some relevant stuff here:
http://www.sitecore.net/Learn/Blogs/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2013/09/Getting-Data-Out-of-the-Sitecore-ASPNET-CMS.aspx
-- Edited to add --
I've not found the blog post I remember. But I came across this SO thread:
Accessing Sitecore API from a CLI tool
which refers to this blog post:
http://www.experimentsincode.com/?p=232
which I think gives the info you'll need for option 1.
(And it reminds me that, of course, when you copy the config stuff you have to copy the Sitecore binaries into your app's folder as well)
I would just like to expand on #JermDavis' post and note that Sitecore isn't a big fan of being accessed when not in a web application. However, if you still want to do this, you will need to make sure that you have all of the necessary configuration settings from the web.config and App_Config of your site in your console application's app.config file.
Moreover, you will never be able to call Sitecore.Context in a console application, as the Sitecore Context sits on top of the HttpContext which means that it must be an application and have a valid request for you to use it. What you are looking for is something more along the lines of Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("master").
Good luck and happy coding :)
This sounds like a job for the Sitecore Item Web API. I use the Sitecore Item Web API whenever I need to access Sitecore data from the master database outside the context of the Content Management server or outside of the context of the Sitecore application. The Web API definitely does not allow you to do everything that the standard Sitecore API does but it can act as a good base and I now extend upon the Web API instead of writing my own custom web services whenever possible.
Thanks to JemDavis's advise.
After I copied the configuration and made changes to config section to get rid of conflicts. I copied almost all of Sitrecore, analytics and lucene dlls, it worked great.
Only thing you have to remember is, copy the app_config folder to the same location where your dlls are.
Thanks again JemDavis....
We are envisioning a product that will have a web front end and mobile apps on multiple platforms (Xamarin). I've already turned a breeze angular hot towel example into a web front end. I am tasked with investigating splitting apart the breeze web client and the breeze server back end. The main reason for this is the mobile devs could potentially use breeze sharp to save their objects to the same breeze back end. It seems like a bad idea to have the breeze web client and server coupled so tightly. I duplicated the project and stripped out the necessary parts on each end to decouple them.
The part I can't figure out is how to get them to talk to each other again. I briefly looked into connectionString, but that doesn't seem to be the right answer. Any ideas on how to get them talking again would be appreciated.
Edit: 20140725 14:23
I've been trying to resolve this on and off since yesterday. I looked into connectionStrings in Web.config and found that that was dead end. Another post made me think that appSettings in Web.config.
I found a parameter in config.js named remoteServiceName. The previous value was "breeze/Breeze" I changed it to
'http://localhost:4545/breeze/Breeze'
The web client still fails:
Error retrieving data.Metadata query failed for: http://localhost:4545/breeze/Breeze/Metadata; HTTP response status 0 and no message. Likely did not or could not reach server. Is the server running? Error: Metadata query failed for: 'http://localhost:4545/breeze/Breeze/Metadata'; HTTP response status 0 and no message. Likely did not or could not reach server. Is the server running?'
When I run that link in its own tab I get metadata.
What did I strip out?: The breeze controller, models, repository (c# only), dbcontext, and BreezeWebApiConfig
Edit 20140725 14:52
Sorry I missed the exception before the one mentioned above:
XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://localhost:4545/breeze/Breeze/Metadata. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://localhost:53555' is therefore not allowed access.
Thank you to everyone for the clues you provided in the comments!
The first part of the answer I already included in my edits above:
I found a parameter in config.js named remoteServiceName. The previous value was "breeze/Breeze" I changed it to
'http://localhost:4545/breeze/Breeze'
That got the client talking attempting to talk to the remote server.
After that the CORS issue stumped me. The three following links helped me solve this issue:
Using Breeze with a WebApi Service from another domain
WebAPI CORS and Ninject
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn532203.aspx
You have to install the CORS packages. From the microsoft article:
First, in order to get the CORS framework, you must reference the CORS libraries from your Web API application (they’re not referenced by default from any of the Web API templates in Visual Studio 2013). The Web API CORS framework is available via NuGet as the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Cors package. If you’re not using NuGet, it’s also available as part of Visual Studio 2013, and you’ll need to reference two assemblies: System.Web.Http.Cors.dll and System.Web.Cors.dll (on my machine these are located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Stack 5\Packages).
The next step was to add a few lines to the config file from the webapi-cors-and-ninject stackoverflow post:
<system.webServer>
<handlers>
</handlers>
<httpProtocol>
<customHeaders>
<!-- Adding the following custom HttpHeader will help prevent CORS from stopping the Request-->
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Content-Type" />
</customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>
Obviously this is a very insecure solution and shouldn't be used for anything other than a development environment.
I am running a Tomcat 6 server configured to use port 7787.I have to post data from a Silverlight app to a servlet running on this server.Ofcourse this is crossdomain so it requires me to have clientaccesspolicy.xml in the root.
I have seen various questions about this here and on the web and all have the same answer.To put the xml in webapps/ROOT.This works if I try to access the xml via
http://somedomain/
However since the servlet is running on port 7787 I have to post to somedomain:7787 and thus Silverlight tries to find the xml under
http://somedomain:7787/
This is unsuccesfull.
I am sure that Silverlight does indeed check somedomain:7787 for the xml as I used Firebug to confirm it.Is there anything in Tomcats configuration I can change or somewhere else I can place the xml so Silverlight can find it under port 7787.Or is there perhaps something I can change on the Silverlight side where the POST is being done?
On Windows machine simply copy the two security files to Tomcat's webapps/ROOT folder
As long as you can get response from ...:7787/crossdomain.xml, anyway solution is OK.
Looks like Silverlight only cares about the response.
I created a Silverlight client and it is OK to get response both from WCF service and Tomcat.
I have created a PivotViewer application with an Azure Web role, and it deploys on my local machine perfectly. When I deploy it to azure, the standard default.aspx "My ASP.NET" application is the loaded page. I can not seem to find a solution in all of the tutorials. If I point the browser to http://solution.cloudapp.net/MyAzureStartPage.aspx, I can also find a perfect deployment, but I can't seem to get the proper home page.
Determining which page to load if none is explicitly specified is a function of the web server. Without configuration changes, the web server is never going to expect to look for your custom page.
Can you not simply rename your desired start page default.aspx? That would be the simplest approach.
Add defaultDocument element in your web.config under configuration/system.webServer node. Something like this will get your default page defined:
<defaultDocument enabled="true">
<files>
<add value="MyAzureStartPage.aspx"/>
</files>
</defaultDocument>
I have a silverlight business aplication that gets data from silverlight enabled webservice.
When I run the application in dev environment, it works fine.
when i deploy the application and the Asp.net web development server is working, then to the application works fine.
But when I stop the development server, the application can't access a service.
My questions are:
When I deploy a silverlight business application, doesn't the service get deployed and get started.
The endpoint address in my ServiceReferences.Clientconfig file is endpoint address="http://localhost:9702/MyWebservice.scv. Do I need to change this?
The enpoint address in the web.config is blank.
Appreciate your help
Because the WCF client code is declared as a "partial" class, what I've been doing to this point is creating another c# partial class file to host a GetClient() method on it. You'll notice that the code is taking into account the port that the service is on... in a few of the environments that I've posted or will be posting to, as well as the development environment, the application is not always on port 80.
Namespace Project.Service
{
public partial class ServiceClient
{
public static ServiceClient GetClient()
{
return new ServiceClient("CustomBinding_Service",
new System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress(new Uri(string.Format("{0}://{1}:{2}/Services/Service.svc",
Application.Current.Host.Source.Scheme, Application.Current.Host.Source.Host, Application.Current.Host.Source.Port), UriKind.Absolute)));
}
}
}
Hope this helps someone!
Yes you are going to want to change your endpoint address. I recommend doing it in the silverlight code when creating the connection to the WCF service. The service itself lives on the web server, whereas the silverlight application lives on the clients computer. If the web server stops, the web service stops but the silverlight app can keep running.
edit:
To do this in code, as long as the path is always in the same domain as the app you can use do like so:
BasicHttpBinding binding = new BasicHttpBinding(BasicHttpSecurityMode.None) //Use whatever security you need here
{
MaxReceivedMessageSize = int.MaxValue,
MaxBufferSize = int.MaxValue
};
Client client = new Client(binding, new EndpointAddress(new Uri(Application.Current.Host.Source, "../MyService.svc")));
Thanks so much for your help. I tried your approach to create the client code but that didn't work. And that's because the problem seems to be somewhere else.
So I installed fiddler to see the traffic.
Fiddler showed that the service was being accessed but the http response code was 302 showing that there was some redirection involved.
The address of my application is like this http:///Silverlightapp/(S(oirppxrwzhlf2a2vbia1ui45))/Default.aspx#/Home and it is hosted on IIS 6.
So I had to employ a workaround by installing the service on machine with IIS7 (and there was no session id involved like in the above url).I still kept the silverlight application hosted on IIS 6.
Anyway, in summary, to anyone who reads the thread, I did the following to troubleshoot and solve issue(temporarily)
Changed the end point address in the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file. When you add the service using discover option in VS, the endpoint address is of the localhost and this must be changed.
Registered the service model using ServiceModelReg -i command. (this solved my problem that my applicaiton was only working from development server and not IIS)
-Put the CrossDomain and ClientAccessPolicy files in c:]inetpub\wwwroot folders.
-Used fiddler to look at http response codes. I had to do no configuration in fiddler.
Changed the binarymessageEncoding to textMessageEncoding iin the web.config file of the silverlight web project that also hosted the ecf service. I did this becasue adding a silverlight enabled wcf service creates a custom binding configuration in the web.config file by default uses binary encoding. I needed text encoding to see errors in fidder. But this didn't help much becasue I only saw the name of the operation in the Inspector>xml tab in fiddler. This was the same even after my issues was resolved by workaround.
Thanks for the help
Don't do it in code. Otherwise you won't be able to change it later without recompiling the application (when the address will need to change, perhaps years down the road when you've lost the source code :)
Change the address in ServiceReferences.ClientConfig to where the service is actually hosted... e.g. http://example.com/myVdir/MyWebservice.svc
If later on you need to change the address without recompiling:
- Open the .xap file (it's just a zip file with a different extension)
- Find the .ClientConfig file and change the address
- Put it back together as a .zip file and rename to .xap
Also, I can't remember anymore whether the .ClientConfig supports relative addresses (e.g. just "MyWebService.svc"), but if it does it may be a good solution as well.