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Summary

When performing a GET request, you can qualify the request using one or more operations described in this section, e.g. specifying a sort order or a filter. This following table summarizes which operations can be combined with other operations. For example, the Filters operation can be combined with Paging, Collection Details and Sort By, as shown by the Filter row. For example, if you want the detailed list of all AWS Systems, listed in alphabetical order by name, you would do the following: Request: 
GET /systems/?platform=AWS&sort_by=name
or without trailing ’/’: 
GET /systems?platform=AWS&sort_by=name
Table: Operations Summary
OperationFiltersPagingCollection DetailsSort By
Filters✔️✔️✔️
Paging✔️✔️✔️
Collection Details✔️✔️✔️
Sort By✔️✔️✔️

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Filters

Most collections can be filtered based on the elements of the resource objects within the collection. The elements that support filtering are identified in the Filter column (marked “F”) of each Resource Elements table within this reference. If the filter finds no matching objects, an empty list is returned. If matching objects are found, a list of objects (in the form ID, Name and Self Reference (id, name, href) for each object) is returned. Note that for date/time elements, only a range is supported as described below. To define an exact match for a date/time element, specify the exact match value using the _from and _to tags. To filter the list of resource objects, simply provide a query string after the resource object of interest, where both <element> and <value> are case insensitive (with no quotes specified): 
GET /<resource object>/?<element>=<value>
For example, if you wanted to filter the list of Systems that are of type host you would do the following:
Request:
GET /systems/?type=host
Response:
[
  {
    "id": "844608bd-2e6a-4201-a9f2-edb4b84389bc",
    "name": "esx-host-82",
    "href": "/systems/844608bd-2e6a-4201-a9f2-edb4b84389bc",
    "resource_id": "ac-59d7-339",
    "type": "host",
    "platform_model": "PowerEdge M610",
    ...
More complex filtering is supported using any combination of the following:
  • Multiple Criterion—specifying "&" to logically AND criteria. /<resource object>/?<element1>=<value1>[&<element2>=<value2>]…
  • Multiple Values—specifying "," between values to logically OR a list of possible values for an element. /<resource object>/?<element>=<value1>[,<value2>]…
  • Ranges—specifying “_from” and “_to” appended to the end of the element name to specify from/to values, respectively. All elements of type number (including date/time elements) support a range. The values must be valid values (e.g. valid UTC values for date/time types); otherwise, a wrong format error is returned.
  • Multi-Valued Elements—specifying at least one value of the multi-valued element.
  • Special Character Support—for filter values with characters that have special meaning in the query string, use the following URL encoding characters instead:
    • “%2B” for ”+”
    • ”_” or ”+” for space
For example, to filter cluster name “eastus+test” and platform category “External Cloud”, use: 
GET /systems/?infrastucture_group=eastus%2Btest&platform_category=External+Cloud
  • Name_Like—use ?name_like="<substring>" in your collection request. The ’%’ character can be used to match zero or more characters.
Densify API elements, parameters, and filters are case-sensitive.

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Paging

When performing a GET request on a collection of objects, a page of objects can be returned instead of the entire collection. To retrieve a specific page, supply the page number (integer >= 0, where 0 is the first page) and the page size, as follows: 
GET /<resource object>/?page=<pagenumber>[&page_size=<pagesize>]
If the page size is not specified, then the page size will be taken from configuration setting API Page Size (parameter key rest.api.paging.pageSize). For example, suppose you have 125 Systems and you want to see the last 25 (with a page size of 100): 
GET /systems/?page=1
If the collection changes in between page requests, the items are shifted appropriately.

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Collection Details

Most collection GET requests support a details option, which returns the details of every resource object in the collection: 
GET /<resource object>/?details=true
The default is ?details=false, if not specified. This option is supported for most collections.

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Individual Details

Every individual GET request uses an id or name to identify the resource object instance to retrieve (where name is used only if the resource object does not have an id). The individual GET request returns all the elements of the identified or named resource object. 
GET /<resource object>/<id>

GET /<resource object>/\<name>
When name is used, the search is case insensitive and returns all matching instances.

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Sort By

Some collection requests support a sort_by option. This option returns the collection of objects in ascending or descending order by the element specified: 
GET /<resource object>/?sort_by=<element>[,asc|desc]
The elements that support sorting are identified in the Sort By column (marked “S”) of each Resource Elements table within this reference. The objects are returned in ascending order by default (or if asc is specified) or descending order if desc is specified. If the collection is sorted with objects having “__Unknown__” values, these objects are listed at the end independent of the sort order applied to such an element. The sorting is alphabetical or numerical, depending if the <element> type is a string or a number, respectively. If the sort_by is not specified, a default sort order is provided and is documented in the Supported Operations section of each resource object. If the <element> is not a valid element for the resource object (note that <element> is case insensitive), then an error is returned. For example, to sort all Systems by name in ascending order, specify: 
GET /systems/?sort_by=name
To sort all Systems by size in descending order, specify the following: 
GET /systems/?sort_by=size,desc
Densify API elements, parameters, and filters are case-sensitive.

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Other Operations (Create/Modify)

The Create/Modify-(Req) column of each Resource Elements table within this reference is used to identify the elements that can be specified when the resource object is created or modified. The elements for create are marked “C” and the elements for modify are marked “M”. Elements that must be specified for create are marked “-R” for required.