Sample: Work with views that need UpdateViewData-like calls

[hartsock]

Demonstrate something similar to:

ds = get_datastore_by_name('datastore_1') ds.update_view_data(name='datastore_01')

[hartsock]

NOTE: This is kind of an interesting problem UpdateViewData is provided as an addon tool in both the Perl SDK and in the Power CLI product lines. The Perl SDK source is visible and should be reproducible in Python.

EDIT: I'm tracing out how the Perl SDK handles this problem and I may pull in help from the Perl team to finish the sample. This will be submitted as a pull request from my own repo since it is unlikely I'll be able to make this work cleanly in my first attempt.

[hartsock]

I've spent the last two work days tracing the inside of the VmomiSupport.py and related tools. In short, each object you have (for example if I did get a vim.Datastore object) has a set of dynamic SOAP handlers associated with it. The trick is to be able to invoke the rename task and then re-invoke the original property collector that retrieved the object.

There's a couple interesting edges here...

• why can't I ask a task to wait for itself (each object has the ServiceInstance injected into it but in a hidden way so you should be able to do this)
• why can't I write over the name value of an object if I know it changed? Unlike the Perl and C# bindings the original author made the attributes of the vim.* objects immutable client side... this subtle difference means that the original author prevents us from doing memory munging to update values... we have to round trip to vSphere to change a value.
• how do I slide in an update if client-side vmodl objects are immutable, can I just re-fire the old property collector embedded in the hidden SOAP stubs?

I am slowly making progress on this and learning the VmomiSupport internals as I go.

Edit:

See also vim.host.NetworkInfo