Subject: when to use special <get> RPC methods

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:27:53 -0800

Hi,

This issue that Phil raised about never using special get
functions because we already defined <get>, is not quite accurate.

There are lots of use cases where a special get function would
be better than using <get>:

   - get-my-session-config paired with set-my-session-config
     Setting per-session knobs are not really supported in NETCONF.
     This would require a table of all the sessions, and then
     lots of access-control configuration to make sure that only
     session X got to access session[X].knobs.  It is much easier
     to use dedicated RPCs and not use <get> or the config database
     at all, for 'my-session' sort of features.
   - deep nested tables with complex keys would be good candidates
     for additional <get-foo> functions.
   - Info which might require the manager to retrieve a lot of data,
     scan it, follow data pointers, and retrieve secondary data.
   - Special reports that are gathered, based on some input parameters,
     processed by the agent (e.g., aggregation), and then some data is returned.

The example at hand is some plain-old statistics in a container,
root under the /netconf element.  The Xpath and subtree filtering
is sufficient for this data, and a special <get-foo> for '/netconf/foo'
seems rather excessive.

Andy

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