About the vCloud API Examples

The vCloud API Programming Guide for Service Providers includes many examples of HTTP requests and responses. These examples show the workflow and content associated with operations such as browsing, provisioning, and managing your cloud and its contents, and operating virtual systems.

Example requests generally conform to the rules listed in Request Bodies. Most example responses show only those elements and attributes that are relevant to the operation being discussed. Ellipses (…) indicate omitted content within response bodies. Several additional conventions apply.

The HTTP Accept header, which is required in all requests, is omitted from most examples. See API Versions for more about this header and how it is used by the vCloud API.
Authorization headers such as x-vcloud-authorization are omitted from most examples. See vCloud API REST Requests for more about how authorization headers are used by the vCloud API.
All other request headers required by the vCloud API are included in example requests that are not fragments of some larger example. Although the examples show these strings using the character case in which the implementation defines them, header names and values are case-insensitive, and can be submitted or returned in any character case. Other HTTP headers, such as Date, Content-Length, and Server, are omitted because they are not relevant to the specifics of any example.
The XML version and encoding header
```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
```
is included in example requests but omitted from example responses.
In most examples, object IDs shown in href attribute values appear as small integers, for example vapp-7 or org/3. In the vCloud API that vCloud Director supports, object IDs are universal unique identifiers (UUIDs) as defined by RFC 4122, for example vapp-f5e185a4-7c00-41f1-8b91-0e552d538101 or org/89a1a8f9-c518-4f53-960c-950db9e3a1fd. Examples that show Role or Right objects use the actual UUIDs for roles and rights, which are invariant across installations.

Required Roles and Rights

Where a topic includes an example, it specifies a prerequisite role that normally has the rights required to run the example. Some examples can be run by roles with fewer rights, or different rights. The prerequisite role might include more rights than the minimum subset required.