Chapter 8. Common Features

This chapter examines features common to resources and collections.

Element property icons

Throughout this guide, the elements of each resource are detailed in tables. These tables include a properties column, displaying icons depicting element properties. The meaning of these icons is shown in Table 8.1, “Element property icons”

Table 8.1. Element property icons

Property	Description	Icon
Required for creation	These elements must be included in the client-provided representation of a resource on creation, but are not mandatory for an update of a resource.
Non-updateable	These elements cannot have their value changed when updating a resource. They are only included in a client-provided representation on update if their values are not altered. Otherwise they are omitted from an update action.
Read-only	These elements are read-only. Values for read-only elements are not created or modified.

8.1. Representations

The API structures resource representations in the following XML document structure:

<{resource} id="{resource_id}" href="/rhevm-api/{collection}/{resource_id}">
    <name>Resource-Name</name>
    <description>A description of the resource</description>
    ...
</{resource}>

In the context of a virtual machine, the representation appears as follows:

<vm id="5b9bbce5-0d72-4f56-b931-5d449181ee06"
  href="/rhevm-api/vms/5b9bbce5-0d72-4f56-b931-5d449181ee06">
    <name>RHEL6-Machine</name>
    <description>Red Hat Enterprize Linux 6 Virtual Machine</description>
    ...
</vm>

The following attributes are common to all resource descriptions:

Element	Type	Description	Properties
`id`	GUID	An opaque server-generated identifier for the resource, which is guaranteed to be unique across all resources in this Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager instance
`href`	string	The canonical location of the resource as an absolute path