In vCO how do you separate the display value from the variable value

[Dragoon96]

I am running Orchestrator 5.5 and would like to create a way to present one value to the user when they start the workflow, but then set the variable to something different. For instance when you select OS for your guest, you are supposed to choose VirtualMachineGuestOsIdentifier. This is a little bit over the average users competence and quite frankly something that I don't want to keep track of either.

Is it possible to do something like in HTML? <option value="winNetEnterpriseGuest">Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition</option>

[schepp · Accepted solution]

Hi,

don't know If you can do it more nicely, but how about giving the users a drop down selection box and match the GuestOSIdentifier with a switch statement in a following scriptable task?

Tim

[qc4vmware]

In our environment I handle this kind of stuff with configuration elements + actions.  For this object type specifically I have a configuration element with one attribute of type array/string per OS identifier.  In our environment we have so many systems to integrate with that might call something like "Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition" something like W2K3ENT, Windows 2003 Enterprise, Win 2003 Enterprise, WIN2003ENT.  I then have an action that I pass the string into and it returns an OS identifier if it matches one of the strings.  You can make the action as smart or dumb as you like.  I think I put in a couple of regular expression checks in as well if I don't get an exact hit.  I'll go ahead and create a package for you and attach it to the message.  I also have an action that can create an object indexed in various ways.  Either by the os name, id , or family.  Its included in the package.  You could use this to keep a configuration element attribute loaded with all of the VMware friendly OS names.  You can than use that attribute as the drop down your users see in the forms.

Anyway that is probably a little overload but the workflows/actions I am going to upload should get you well on your way.

[Dragoon96]

Thank You both for Your replies. I realize that I have to change my mindset slightly, but that should not be a problem.