vSphere Client SDK 6.7 Update 1 Release Notes

Updated on: 16 NOVEMBER 2018

vSphere Client SDK 6.7 Update 1 | 16 OCTOBER 2018 | Build 10167231

Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

What's in the Release Notes

The release notes cover the following topics:

Overview

The vSphere Client 6.7 Update 1 SDK enables vSphere HTML5 client plugin development with improved security, stability, deployment time, plugin isolation, choice of development technology, and multi-version plugin support.  The SDK also provides APIs required for vSphere Client plugin development on VMware Cloud on AWS.  

The SDK provides all the tools, libraries, and plugin samples needed for developers to get started and build advanced solutions integrated with the vSphere Client. The vSphere Client SDK consists of the following components: 

  • Libraries for server and user interface development
  • Documentation about setting up your development environment, building HTML plugins, and troubleshooting information.
  • SDK API reference documentation
  • Sample HTML plugins
  • Various SDK tools

What's New

This release of the vSphere Client SDK introduces the following new features:

  • Remote plugins support
    A substantially new architecture and mechanism for integrating plugins into the vSphere Client UI while the existing plugin architecture is still supported.
    Some highlights:

  • Remote plugin architecture integrates the UI of a plugin solution served by external plugin servers.

    • No executable plugin bits on the vCenter Server as the plugin is no longer deployed on the vSphere Client application server.

    • Predictable stability, security, performance and upgrade of both vSphere and the plugin solution.

    • Business logic from the service layer is running on the plugin server and can be based on any technology of choice (not necessarily Java & OSGi).

    • New simplified JSON-based extensibility format.

    • Ability to hide the Object Navigator and take over the majority of vSphere Client's real estate.

  • JS API migration tool
    A tool that helps with converting existing plugins from the HTML Bridge API (in the vSphere Web Client SDK) to latest JavaScript API.

  • HTML sample improvements
    The html-sample was improved to show more extensions, a vCenter Server selector with retrieved information from the Java layer, and plugin coding best practices.

  • New Remote plugin sample

Resolved Issues

  • Since 6.5U1, plugin menus display only direct action menu items but ignore separators and sub-menus.  Any actions defined after the first level of the menu are discarded.

    Description: Ability to define submenus and separators on vSphere objects.

  • Calling the "sendModelChangeEvent()" API with "ADD" operation type resulted in the object lists not being updated.

    Description: The sendModelChangeEvent can be called with ADD operation type.

  • Plugins were not properly localized if the current browser locale was "en" (when the vSphere Client locale "en_US" should be used by default).

    Description: Added plugin localization fallback to English US if the current locale is not supported by the plugin.

  • Some plugin data requests were failing, leaving the plugin view empty.

    Description: Fixed concurrency bug which intermittently resulted in the Java getUserSession API returning null.

  • If a plugin navigator extension was using the <privilege> tag, it was never shown (regardless of the user privilege). In the same scenario shortcuts and global views were always shown.

    Description: Ability to filter global views by a user privilege: if the user has the privilege defined with the <privilege> tag, the global view is displayed; otherwise a predefined no-access message is displayed.  Filtering by privilege is not supported for shortcuts and Object Navigator extensions which should be always visible in the vSphere Client for performance reasons.

  • Plugin extensions are visible on inventory objects on vCenter Servers where the plugin had not been registered.

    Description:  Fixed misbehaving extension filtering in multi-vCenter Server environments. vSphere Client was missing the feature to display plugin extensions only for the inventory objects of the vCenter Servers the plugin is registered with. If plugin extensions need to be visible on the whole inventory the plugin should be registered with all vCenter Servers.

Known Issues

  • ${namespace}.manage.tagsViews extensions are not displayed.

    Description: The ${namespace}.manage.tagsViews extension point is not supported in vSphere 6.5 and later releases.  

    In the vSphere Client, you can no longer add a view under the Tags second-level tab of the Configure tab by using the ${namespace}.manage.tagsViews extension point.  You can find the Tags second-level tab under the Tags & Custom Attributes application in the vSphere Navigator.

    Workaround: Use the ${namespace}.manageViews extension point instead.

  • Global refresh updates only one of the extensions having the same URL.

    Two portlets in the same plugin cannot share the same URL.  When a vSphere Client plugin contains two portlets, they must specify different values for their attributes. Otherwise, a global refresh operation updates only one of the portlets.

    Workaround: Assign different URLs to the two portlets. For example:

       <extension id="portlet1">
      ...
      <url>/vsphere-client/chassisa/resources/host-portlet1.html</url>
      ...
   </extension>
   <extension id="portlet2">
      ...
      <url>/vsphere-client/chassisa/resources/host-portlet2.html</url>
      ...
   </extension>
  • Errors displaying plugin extensions when running a local vSphere Client instance from Eclipse.

    Missing plugin views in the vSphere Client UI, caused by wrong context path or clashing X-Frame-Options when starting the Virgo server from Eclipse.

    You can start the Virgo server in your development environment in one of two ways: either by using the startup script or by using Eclipse.  If you start the Virgo server from Eclipse, it adopts the context path of the vSphere Web Client rather than the context path of the vSphere Client. The Virgo log shows this entry:

    [2018-03-27T17:52:54.982-07:00] [INFO] start-signalling-1 org.eclipse.virgo.medic.eventlog.default WE0000I Starting web bundle 'com.vmware.samples.globalviewhtml' version '1.0.0' with context path '/vsphere-client/globalview'.

    The correct context path for the vSphere Client is /ui/globalview rather than /vsphere-client/globalview.

    Workarounds:

    • Start the Virgo server from the command line with the startup.bat or startup.sh script.
    • Add the following two arguments to the list of VM arguments in the launch configurations of the Virgo server:
      • 	-Dweb.context.path.match=vsphere-client
	-Dweb.context.path.replace=ui
  • Memory increases on IE11 with each opened plugin iframe leading to OutOfMemory error after some time.

    Memory leak with Microsoft Internet Explorer 11.  vSphere Client's memory consumption increases steadily when using Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 with iframes in vSphere Client plugins. (This issue is reported at https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/8449104/)

    Workaround: Use other browsers supported with the vSphere Client, such as Chrome or Firefox.