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Key integration concepts
8 REST API Guide–OpenManage Essentials
An example of a base URI for OpenManage Essentials is as follows:
https://192.168.0.1:2607/api/OME.svc/
The rest of the document will reference this example as <BASE_URI>.
Security
The REST services will be exposed only through HTTPS to ensure that the common threats associated with
HTTP traffic are mitigated. Administrator will have the option of updating the SSL self-signed certificate with a
customer-provided certificate (for example, by uploading a PKCS-12 certificate or by signing an application-
generated CSR request).
Authentication mechanisms
There are several common schemes for enabling authentication of REST requests. The following is a summary
of the most common schemes:
Basic authentication
The authorization header in the request has the base-64 encoding of the credentials (username and password).
If the credentials are not provided, a 401 (Authorization Failure) error is returned. Because the encoding is
weak, this mechanism is only supported when SSL/TLS is used for the transport.
Digest authentication
The authorization header in the request has a digest computed from the user credentials. The server verifies if
the digest matches a digest it computes. This is more secure than basic authentication since the credentials
are not encoded over the wire.
Resource addressing
Each resource that is managed needs to be uniquely addressable using a distinct URI. The URI syntax needs
to be intuitive and indicative of any associative relationship with a parent resource.
There are several acceptable ways to address specific resources either as instances of specific resource
classes or within an associated parent context.
1) Pattern: <BASE_URI>/<resource class identifier>/<resource instance identifier>
Example: <BASE_URI>/Devices/1234 (where, 1234 is the unique identifier for the device)
2) Pattern: <BASE_URI>/<parent resource identifier>/<resource class identifier>
Example: <BASE_URI>/DeviceGroups/5/Devices/1234/Firmware
(To retrieve all the firmware resources for a specific device)
Resource operations
The standard HTTP methods are used for performing create, retrieve, update, and delete operations on the
resources. The mapping of the HTTP methods to operational semantics is described in the following table: