Request catalog item with provisioning request

In order to specify properties on individual components within a blueprint, use the “Request catalog item with provisioning request” workflow or similar method. There is a sample workflow included in the vRA7 vRO plugin that you can go and have a look at or copy it you like. However, here are the basics of the Javascript code to get it done:

To start, we need to obtain the provisioning request for the catalog item, as it would be presented within the vRA portal. This will not actually request the item from vRA, but rather provide us with a Javascript object that represents the request to be submitted. We can then alter the properties on the provisioning request object and then submit the object to vRA as a request to be processed. We’ll assign the request to a new object called myProvisioningRequest in Javascript like this:

var myProvisioningRequest = vCACCAFERequestsHelper.getProvisioningRequestForCatalogItem(attCatalogItem) // attCatalogItem is of type vCACCAFE:CatalogItem

If you were to do a System.log(myProvisioningRequest); now, you’d see a block of unformatted JSON data (amongst other things in a dynamic wrapper), containing all of the data relevant to the catalog request for the catalog item specified.

With the provisioning request now contained within the myProvisioningRequest object, we can set properties such as the description and the request reason using built-in methods, just like we would in the vRA request portal.

myProvisioningRequest.setDescription(“Some description”);
myProvisioningRequest.setReason(“Some reason”);

Setting other properties before requesting the catalog item

In order to set properties such as CPU, memory, or any other custom properties we’ve defined on the virtual machine within the blueprint, we can get the provisioning request data from our myProvisioningRequest object and change the data. To do this, we call the getProvisioningRequestData method and pass in our myProvisioningRequest object as a parameter.

var getProvisioningRequestData = vCACCAFERequestsHelper.getProvisioningRequestData(myProvisioningRequest);

With the provisioning request data contained in the getProvisioningRequestData object, we can use the JavaScript JSON.parse() function to create a usable object:

var setRequestData = JSON.parse(getProvisioningRequestData);

Cool eh?!

Dumping the contents of setProvisioningRequestData, you’ll see the properties that can be set. To set them simply do:

setRequestData.<blueprintComponentName>.data.property = value; 

Like so:

setRequestData.vSphere_Machine_1.data.cpu = 2;

So this is all easy, and makes sense right? Yes, until when it doesn’t… What if you have a custom property defined like this:

My.Department.Name

or a built in one like this:

VirtualMachine.Software0.Name

In this case, you’d think you can just specify them and get away with it, but no, you can’t just do this:

setRequestData.vSphere_Machine_1.data.VirtualMachine.Software0.Name = “MySoftware” //Wrong

If you specify the property like I’ve done above you’ll get the following error:

“TypeError: Cannot read property “VirtualMachine” from undefined”

What does that mean?! It means that JavaScript is trying to access a property called VirtualMachine rather than a property called “VirtualMachine.Software0.Name”. This is happening because JavaScript sees the dot (.) as a delimiter, so it starts to walk an object tree that doesn’t exist. We need to try and escape the “.” and we can do so by calling the property in a different way altogether:

setRequestData.vSphere_Machine_1.data[“VirtualMachine.Software0.Name”] = “MySoftware”; //Correct

So after the custom properties are set in our JSON object, we need to set the request data back on the provisioning request object:

vCACCAFERequestsHelper.setProvisioningRequestData(myProvisioningRequest, JSON.stringify(setRequestData));

Now with the provisioning request updated, we can go ahead and make the provisioning request to vRA:

System.getModule(“com.vmware.library.vcaccafe.request”).requestCatalogItemWithProvisioningRequest(attCatalogItem, myProvisioningRequest);