Point to vAPI Endpoint with JavaScript in vRO

This article covers a scenario where you need to point and work with vAPI endpoint entirely with JavaScript. It wasn’t as flawless as I expected and I spent quite some time to figure it out. Let’s jump in.

A while back Angel Iliev wrote 2 very detailed articles covering vAPI and working with tags in vSphere:
vSphere 6 Automation with vRO 7 – Tags and vAPI – Part I – The Virtualist
vSphere Automation with vRO 7 – Tags and vAPI – Part II – The Virtualist

Usually, when using the vAPI endpoint from a workflow, you can add it as an attribute with a predefined value so the end users would not need to select it at run time. That’s really handy for all types of known or constant attributes. However, recently I had to work with vSphere tags only via vRO action element. As you know, you can’t have an attribute with predefined value in an action element as you do in a workflow. So basically, I needed variable pointing to my VAPIEndpoint object.

First stop of course – the API explorer. Expanding the vAPI plug in, seems like the VAPI Manager class has a function called findEndpoint, which would give me exactly what I’m looking for:
It accepts single argument of type string which should be the vAPI endpoint URL. Great, that’s easy. The vAPI endpoint URL is in the format: https://<vCenter FQDN or IP>:443/api
Now passing this as argument of the findEndpoint function and printing the variable to see what we got in return:

var myEndpoint = VAPIManager.findEndpoint("https://192.168.1.204:443/api");
System.log("My endpoint: "+myEndpoint);

And here is the result:
Well, null was not what I expected. I started different approach – reverse engineering. I added an attribute of type VAPI:VAPIEndpoint to the workflow and selected my endpoint as a value:
Looking again at the API explorer, the VAPIEndpoint class has property named endpointUrl which will return the URL as a string – exactly what the findEndpoint function needed.
I was interested what would it look like, so first just printed it out:

System.log(endpoint.endpointUrl);

Here is the result:
Exactly what I’ve passed to the findEndpoint function before without success.

After some time spent with google trying to find something relevant, I came back to vRO and printed out the entire VAPIEndpoint object:

System.log(endpoint);

And the result:
Here I noticed something in the square brackets containing the “known properties”: ENDPOINT–https___192.168.1.204_443_api

It does contain the vAPI endpoint URL in a little bit weird format, but that was enough for me to give it a try:

var myEndpoint = VAPIManager.findEndpoint("ENDPOINT--https___192.168.1.204_443_api");
System.log("My endpoint: "+myEndpoint);

And voila:
Now I got what I needed and I was able to continue working on my action element.

I find the description of the findEndpoint function misleading, as using the URL would not get you any result. My current setup is:
vRO – 7.1.0
vAPI plugin – 7.1.0

I hope this would save you the time I spent wondering what is wrong. If you notice different behavior in older or newer versions of the plugin please share!

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Ivaylo Ivanov

Ivaylo has 5 years of professional IT experience. Most of it in server administration area, network and virtualization technologies. From 2014 he specializes in VMware products family. He holds VCIX6-DCV and VCP7-CMA certifications. vExpert 2016/2017

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