Creating Profiles / available methods list on iControl?

Hi Richard, Glad you got things going. Java and PowerShell are 2 different beasts but they both require you to allocate custom objects. Java uses "new" and PowerShell uses "New-Object". It's a little beyond the scope for us to give tutorials on all the languages we support but I will put it on my list to do a short "primer" for each language to give you the ins/outs of using the various elements.

 

 

As for the arrays, that question gets asked alot. It started back when we developed the iControl interfaces for BIG-IP version 4.x. In there, we had methods that only took single scalar values. But, iControl is used by a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Imaging this method (just made up to illustrate the point)

 

 

LocalLBPool.set_some_value(string pool_name, string value);

 

 

This works great if you are trying to change the value for one pool. But what happens if you need to change that value for 1000 pools? What about 5000 pools? Let's say the latency in a single call is 200 ms to bring up/tear down the SSL connection. To execute 1000 calls, that would introduce a 200 s. (3.5 mins) overhead just to make those calls. For 5000 calls, that would be 16.5 minutes.

 

 

So, we decided to make all of our methods "bulk" enabled so that users could combine multiple calls in a single one. This ends up being a little more difficult for the users that want to make a single change, but it eliminates the latency issue for large volume method calls.

 

 

In the current release we have over 5000+ methods calls in iControl and for us to have 2 versions: one bulk, and one for scalars was deemed too much for us to support.

 

 

Hope this explains it a bit.

 

 

-Joe