Using the VS Code Extension

Overview

A Visual Studio Code extension that provides code intelligence features and enables a more developer-friendly experience when creating VMware vRealize Orchestrator and VMware vRealize Automation content.

For detailed information on the vRDT Extension please refer to the extensions Github repository and its documentation.

Features

Multiple environments

Connect to different Orchestrator environments by configuring maven profiles in ~/.m2/settings.xml.

<profile>
    <id>my-env</id>
    <properties>
        <!-- Orchestrator Connection -->
        <vro.host>10.27.120.27</vro.host>
        <vro.port>443</vro.port>
        <vro.username>administrator@vsphere.local</vro.username>
        <vro.password>myPlainTextPass</vro.password>
        <vro.auth>basic</vro.auth> <!-- or 'vra' for sso auth -->
        <vro.tenant>vsphere.local</vro.tenant>
        <vro.authHost>10.27.120.27</vro.authHost> <!-- required for 'vra' auth -->
        <vro.refresh.token>CrxGISrDKxqwfvitdnmlodXxneHARsFi</vro.refresh.token>

        <!-- vRA Connection -->
        <vra.host>10.27.120.27</vra.host>
        <vra.port>443</vra.port>
        <vra.username>configurationadmin@vsphere.local</vra.username>
        <vra.password>myPlainTextPass</vra.password>
        <vra.tenant>vsphere.local</vra.tenant>
    </properties>
</profile>

Once vRealize Developer Tools extension is activated in VS Code, on the bottom left corner of the status bar, an idicator is shown if there is no currently active profile.

Click on it to see list of all available profiles and select one to activate.

Active profile name and the IP address of the vRealize Orchestrator instance is shown in the status bar.

Project on-boarding

The vRealize: New Project command from the VS Code comand palette (Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P) can be used to on-board a new vRealize project.

Orchestrator-aware IntelliSense

Visual Studio Code's IntelliSense feature for JavaScript files is enhanced with with symbols and information from the Orchestrator’s core scripting API, plug-in objects and actions.

Run action

The vRealize: Run Action command from the VS Code comand palette (Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P) allows running an action JavaScript file in live Orchestrator instance while seeing the logs in the OUTPUT panel.

Explore the inventory

An Orchestrator explorer view is available in the activity bar that allows browsing the whole Orchestrator inventory (actions, workflows, resources, configurations, packages and plugin objects).

• Browse, search by name, fetch source (read-only) of all elements
• Fetch schema (read-only) of workflows
• 3 different layouts for the actions hierarchy (controlled by vrdev.views.explorer.actions.layout setting)
  • tree - Displays action packages as a tree
  • compact - Displays action packages as a tree, but flattens any folders that have no children
  • flat - Displays action packages as a list
• Delete packages
• Browse the inventory and see properties of each plugin object

Inventory Caching

There is a support for Orchestrator inventory items caching in order not to overload Orchestrator on heavily loaded environments. If the vrdev:vro:inventory:cache setting is enabled in the plugin settings, the Orchestrator inventory items will be fetched once from the Orchestrator server during visual studion code session. When there are changes in Orchestrator inventory made during visual studio code session they will not be fetched. In order to maintain fresh load of data either disable the cache setting or reload the visual studio code.

Push and Pull content

The VS Code build tasks palette (Cmd+Shift+B / Ctrl+Shift+B) contains commands for pushing content to a live Orchestrator/vRA instance and for pulling workflows, configurations, resources and vRA content back to your local machine – in a form suitable for committing into source control.

The vrdev.tasks.exclude setting can be used to exclude certain projects from the list of build tasks (Cmd+Shift+B) by using glob patterns

"vrdev.tasks.exclude" : [
    "my.example.library*", // Exclude all libraries
    "!my.example.library*", // Exclude everything, except libraries
    "my.example!(library*)", // Exclude everything from 'my.example', except libraries
    "my.example.library:{nsx,vra,vc}", // Exclude nsx, vra and vc libraries
    "my.example.library:util" // Exclude util library (<groupId>:<artifactId>)
]

Display Hints in Java Script Projects

The VS Code plugin supports displaying action hints for modules and actions that are present in Orchestrator along with the modules and actions that are part of the currently opened project. If you type:

System.getModule("com.module.path.").

or

Class.load("com.module.path.").

a list of hints with modules available on Orchestrator and in locally opened projects would be presented as list, furthermore methods and parameters would be also present as hints, as shown in the example below:

The hinting functionality also supports displaying hints for constructors, methods and attributes of all Scripting API (Orchestrator plugin) objects available on the Orchestrator server, as shown in the example below: