Client Development Best Practices

Using Provider Data Sheets

Provider Data Sheets (PDSs) greatly help an implementer of client applications to understand the available management functionality. Provider developers are expected to publish a PDS for their provider. The Appendix D “Example Provider Data Sheet” shows the kind of information typically contained in these data sheets. A PDS contains the following information:

Of particular interest are the tables in the section on “Using Provider Data Sheets”. These tables describe:

Client implementers should carefully consider the implications of provider implementations on managed platforms. Differences in format and content of the returned results on platforms may have implications on the client application.

Prototyping with wbemexec

When analyzing the appropriate techniques for schema navigation and determining the type of data available on a managed system, it is often useful to prototype the functionality using the general-purpose wbemexec client included with HP WBEM Services for HP-UX. wbemexec takes a CIM-XML request from a file or standard input, sends it to a CIM server, receives the response, and displays it to standard output.

Thus, a client developer can encode various CIM operations of interest (e.g. enumerateInstanceNames, getInstance, or createInstance) in XML and observe the CIM Server/provider's response to the operations. The CIM-XML requests can be executed against multiple target platforms to get a better understanding of supported schema, data volume, data availability, and provider performance. Revisions can then be made to the information being retrieved and to the way of navigating available schema to improve the client design. Once these adjustments have been made, the client developer can then incorporate the lessons learned from this prototype into the client implementation based on the client APIs.

More information on wbemexec is available in the man page included with HP WBEM Services for HP-UX.