API Guide

Table Of Contents

HTTP Message Bodies

All HTTP Requests and Responses support both XML and JSON content types. The examples used

throughout this document show HTTP body content in XML form. The represented data models

accepted and returned by the API calls can be quite complex. The structure of these data models is

detailed in Appendix B in a language independent representation. While it is possible to craft say an XML

request body from this reference documentation, a much more convenient method is to GET an existing

object from ASM in the desired representation ( XML or JSON ) and save it to a file for use as a skeleton

for future requests involving that model type.

Since a fresh system will not have any existing Deployments. A Deployment model is shown below for

illustration. It is actually only a skeleton because it is lacking the essential ServiceTemplate content that

would make it useful. For more information see the Usage Example called Deploy a Service.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<deploymentName>Ottomatic</deploymentName>

<deploymentDescription>test REST deployment</deploymentDescription>

<allUsersAllowed>false</allUsersAllowed>

<canCancel>false</canCancel>

<canDelete>false</canDelete>

<canDeleteResources>false</canDeleteResources>

<canEdit>false</canEdit>

<canMigrate>false</canMigrate>

<canRetry>false</canRetry>

<canScaleupApplication>false</canScaleupApplication>

<canScaleupCluster>false</canScaleupCluster>

<canScaleupServer>false</canScaleupServer>

<canScaleupStorage>false</canScaleupStorage>

<canScaleupVM>false</canScaleupVM>

<updateServerFirmware>false</updateServerFirmware>

<individualTeardown>false</individualTeardown>

<teardown>false</teardown>

<retry>false</retry>

</serviceTemplate>

</Deployment>

Validations

Message bodies are subject to a wide range of validations. Capturing every validation rule is currently

beyond the scope of this document but a few general rules are worth noting.

• In general validation failures generate exceptions and structured messages to isolate the violation. See

the section on Exception Handling for more details. Most validation exceptions return a 400 HTTP

response, but some API methods generate specific HTTP response codes to indicate particular

exceptions. These are listed in the API reference in the Appendix.