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emacintosh
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

XaaS Output Formatting Options

Does anyone have any tricks or advice for providing complex output back to a user in a vRA. 

We have some vRO workflows exposed as catalog items, but trying to provide a readable output can be difficult.  For example, we have a workflow that takes some input and will create multiple server names, register them in the cmdb and create dns records to reserve ip addresses.  So all of the names/ips/records are outputted from the workflow, using a single output variable.

But in vRA, there seems to be one row for each output variable and no intelligence on how to display it.  For example, if your output is a Properties...then you just see something like [object].  Strings are readable and so are arrays of strings but that's it as far as i can tell.  An array of Properties just displays as [object],[object]...[object]

For now, we're just returning a json string, which our users will have to prettify elsewhere for readability.  But i'm hoping there's a way to tell vRA to use like a datagrid or something else to display complex output like they do for inputs on custom forms.

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RebeccaW
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Are you returning the Array of Properties back to them on the request form?

I do not have an XaaS currently but do have a Resource Action where the form has a data grid which shows the user some related information. The external source for the data grid is a vRO action which returns an Array of Properties. For the Data Grid the columns are defined with the ID matching the keys in the Properties.

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emacintosh
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Thanks for the reply.  This is actually for the Output of an XaaS, which shows up in the resulting deployment on the "workflow" node. 

So in this case, the user submits the request in vRA, then our workflow does stuff, then we return the Outputs of the workflow back to vRA to be displayed in the deployment.  That's where we run into the formatting problems....pretty sure vRA just toString()'s whatever they get and stuffs into an html table cell. 

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RebeccaW
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Makes sense. We have a number of workflows where we are generating emails. For info sources that are JSON the JSON.parse is working well to extract out the needed pieces. 

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emacintosh
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Hot Shot

Yeah, email is probably our only option for getting them the info in a prettier way.

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