4.1

find Operation
The find operation finds elements that correspond to a particular query.
The find operation obtains objects of any type by searching for a particular name. The query results are
provided in the form of a QueryResult object, which contains an array of FinderResult objects with a total
counter. The query itself is passed to find as the second parameter, as the following operation declaration
shows.
public QueryResult find(String type, String query, String username, String password);
The plug-in that contains the objects that you are looking for parses the query. The plug-in defines the query
language that the find operation uses. Consequently, the syntax of the query parameter differs according to
the implementation of the plug-in. Most of the officially supported Orchestrator plug-ins do not store any
objects in the inventory, so they do not expose anything that can be searched for.
Table 8-1 describes the find operationquery parameter syntax and behavior for each of the supported
Orchestrator plug-ins.
Table 8-1. Query Syntax of the Orchestrator Plug-Ins
Orchestrator Plug-In Query Parameter Syntax Query Behavior
Database, for example Lifecycle
Manager
String Searches for object names in SQL
database tables. Orchestrator sets the
search string in a SQL WHERE keyword
search. It searches the primary keys,
then the object IDs in the database.
Enumeration Not applicable Stores nothing in the inventory. You can
find enumerations on each data type
that contains enumeration types.
Jakarta common set Not applicable Stores nothing in the inventory.
JDBC Not applicable Stores nothing in the inventory.
Library Not applicable Stores nothing in the inventory.
Mail Not applicable Stores nothing in the inventory.
SSH If you have configured Orchestrator to
use SSH connections, you can make
queries SSH commands.
Stores nothing in the inventory.
vCenter Server String or null Ignores the query string and returns all
objects of the specified type.
XML Not applicable Stores nothing in the inventory.
When you develop plug-ins, you can define a query language to use find to search for named objects through
the custom plug-in. This definition is not mandatory. The syntax of the query parameter is entirely dependent
on the query language that the plug-in implements. To avoid defining a query language, make find return all
objects, as in the case of the VMware Infrastructure plug-ins.
The size of the array of objects that the QueryResult returns depends on the definition of the plug-in through
which you make the query. For the queries you make through the standard Orchestrator plug-ins, the array
contains an unlimited number of FinderResult objects. Developers of third-party plug-ins, however, can set a
limit on the number of results that the query returns. If the value of totalCount exceeds the number of objects
in the array of FinderResult objects, the array does not include all of the objects found in the queried inventory.
The totalCount property does report the total number of FinderResult objects found. The totalCount property
can be negative, which signifies that the plug-in cannot determine how many corresponding objects are in the
plug-in.
vCenter Orchestrator Developer's Guide
268 VMware, Inc.