7.2

Integer Property
Use the integer property type for zeros, and positive or negative integers.
Decimal Property
Use the decimal property type for values representing non-repeating decimal fractions.
When Your Software Component Needs Information from Another
Component
In several deployment scenarios, a component needs the property value of another component to
customize itself. You can do this with vRealize Automation by creating property bindings. You can design
your Software action scripts for property bindings, but the actual bindings are configured by the architect
that assembles the blueprint.
In addition to setting a property to a hard-coded value, a software architect, IaaS architect, or application
architect can bind Software component properties to other properties in the blueprint, such as an IP
address or an installation location. When you bind a Software property to another property, you can
customize a script based on the value of another component property or virtual machine property. For
example, a WAR component might need the installation location of the Apache Tomcat server. In your
scripts, you can configure the WAR component to set the server_home property value to the Apache
Tomcat server install_path property value in your script. As long as the architect who assembles the
blueprint binds the server_home property to the Apache Tomcat server install_path property, then the
server_home property value is set correctly.
Your action scripts can only use properties that you define in those scripts, and you can only create
property bindings with string and array values. Blueprint property arrays are not returned in any specific
order, so binding to clusterable or scalable components might not produce the values you expect. For
example, your software component requires each of the machine IDs of a cluster of machines, and you
allow your users to request a cluster from 1-10, and to scale the deployment from 1-10 machines. If you
configure your software property as a string type, you get a single randomly selected machine ID from the
cluster. If you configure your software property as an array type, you get an array of all the machine IDs in
the cluster, but in no particular order. If your users scale the deployment, the order of values could be
different for each operation. To make sure you never lose values for clustered components, you can use
the array type for any software properties. However, you must design your software components so they
don't expect a value array in any specific order.
See the Examples of String Property Bindings table for examples of a string property value when binding
to different types of properties.
Table 4‑45. Examples of String Property Bindings
Sample Property Type Property Type to Bind Binding Outcome (A binds to B)
String (property A) String (property B="Hi") A="Hi"
String (property A) Content (property
B="http://my.com/content")
A="http://my.com/content"
Configuring vRealize Automation
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