Hi there,
I'm about to migrate our VCO plugin to 5.1 and was really excited to learn that you can now use annotations to generate the vso.xml. Now the docs (vcenter-orchestrator-51-develop-plugins-guide.pdf) state that "The Orchestrator annotations are included inside the o11n-plugin-sdk-tools.jar file,..." however this JAR is not part of the VMware-VCO-Plug-In-SDK-5.1.0-832102.zip or any other JAR/ZIP of the 5.1 SDK.
So the question is, has this feature (annotations) been silently deprecated or is this merely a packaging error?
Regards,
Igor
Hi Igor,
You'll be able to find the o11n-plugin-sdk-tools.jar file inside the o11n-plugin-sdk-plugen.jar. The full path looks like:
...\VMware-VCO-Plug-In-SDK-5.1.0-832102.zip\VMware-VCO-Plug-In-SDK\lib\o11n-plugin-sdk-plugen.jar\__alias__\lib\o11n-plugin-sdk-tools.jar
The idea is that the library will be automatically available for new plug-ins that are generated with the Plug-in SDK generation tools. But since it can be used also by exisiting plug-ins, like in your case, probably it's a good idea to put that jar in the main lib directory as well to make it more accessible. We'll fix it for the next version. Thank you for the feedback!
I hope it helps.
Sergio
Hi Sergio,
thanks, that helps a lot indeed. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "The idea is that the library will be automatically available for new plug-ins that are generated with the Plug-in SDK generation tools." -- could you elaborate a bit? I haven't seen anything that would suggest this feature in the eclipse plugin...
Thanks,
Igor
Hi Igor,
What I mean is described in the document that you mention (vcenter-orchestrator-51-develop-plugins-guide.pdf) in the chapters "Create a Plug-In Skeleton from an Existing Java Library" and "Create a Plug-In Skeleton from an Inventory Definition". Basically there are a couple of wizards accessible from Eclipse that allow you to generate working vCO plug-in project skeletons whether from a single jar file or from a predefined (XML) inventory. You can give it a try.
I hope it helps.
Sergio
PS: If you have more feedback about the SDK, we'll be happy to hear about it 🙂