The schema reference includes detailed information about the XML representations of all vCloud Air API objects and HTTP requests that operate on those objects.

The API represents objects in a cloud as XML documents in which object properties are contained in elements and attributes that have typed values, and an explicit object hierarchy defined by an XML schema. The schema reference includes reference material for all elements, types, and operations in vCloud Air.

Clients of RESTful Web services must be able to request object representations from the server, parse the server's responses to extract the information contained in the responses, and compose requests that are based on the information extracted from the responses.

vCloud Air uses a validating XML parser that requires elements in XML documents to agree in order and number with the schema. Required elements must appear in requests. All elements that appear in requests must appear in the order established by the schema, and with content that conforms to the type constraint specified in the schema.

The schema reference is available in HTML format in the vCloud Air Documentation Center. See vCloud Air Platform REST APIs Schema Reference.

The schema reference includes the schema definition files. To download the complete set of schemas for the vCloud Air Platform APIs, see Download an Archive in the vCloud Air Documentation Center.