4.1

Table Of Contents
hasChildrenInRelation Operation
The hasChildrenInRelation operation checks whether a given relation type has any children.
In some cases, objects are most easily located through their relationships with other objects. You can obtain all
the objects that relate to another object by a given relation by calling the findRelation operation on that object.
The findRelation operation finds only the relatives of a known object. The hasChildrenInRelation operation
checks for the presence of objects that present a given relation property. hasChildrenInRelation checks for
the presence of objects that are children of other objects and are related to their parents by a given relation
type. For example, a snapshot of a virtual machine is a child of the original virtual machine. Checking for all
virtual machines that are children of other virtual machines enables you to identify all snapshots.
Knowing how a child is related to its parent is useful if you develop tree viewers to view the objects in the
library. The hasChildrenInRelation operation is declared as follows.
public int hasChildrenInRelation(String parentType, String parentId, String relation, String
username, String password);
Type Value Description
String
parentType
Type of parent object. You can narrow
the search by specifying the parent type,
which limits the result to children
related by the given relation to parents
of a given parent type.
This value can be null, in which case
hasChildrenInRelation checks for
child objects related by the specified
relation type to all types of parent.
String
parentId
ID of a particular parent object.
Specifying the parentId allows you to
check for children related by a given
relation to a particular parent. This
check is useful if a particular parent has
large numbers of children that are
related to it by different relation types.
The findRelation operation returns
all of that parent's children, regardless
of the relation
type.hasChildrenInRelation checks
for the presence of only the children
related by the desired relation type.
This value can be null if you call
hasChildrenInRelation on the root
object of the hierarchy of objects.
String
relation
The type of relation by which children
are related to their parents.
Relation types are specified in the
vso.xml file for each plug-in.
String
username
Orchestrator user name.
String
password
Orchestrator password.
vCenter Orchestrator Developer's Guide
276 VMware, Inc.