Hi everyone,
as far as XML goes "extradata" is a simple key/value store. The meaning
of the value varies greatly with the key, and the ones you mentioned
starting with GUI/ are internal stuff managed by the VirtualBox VM
manager UI code.
I would strongly advise against relying on those extradata fields,
because they're not immediately written out (IIRC it's postponed until
GUI termination, or at least for a while to not trigger too many
updates). They're also updated only when the GUI is running. One can
create VMs (and organize them in groups) without using the GUI, and then
this is stale data...
The only truly reliable approach is to use the VirtualBox API. You can
query which VMs are there, which groups, ...
Interpreting the XML files is theoretically possible, but there have
been many changes over the years which moved attributes and tags around,
changed defaults and so on. So getting this right will be essentially
implementing a 2nd version of the XML parsing code in VirtualBox, which
is quite a bit of hairy code in src/VBox/Main/xml/Settings.cpp
The only thing which is possible with usual XML tools is to validate
them against src/VBox/Main/xml/VirtualBox-settings.xsd (and it's likely
that you find some perfectly valid config files which don't validate due
to sloppiness/bugs in the XML schema definition).
Klaus
On 2021-11-03 15:04, fth0 wrote:
Hi Bernard, hi Stéphane,
the only "documentation" of the VirtualBox.xml format that I know of
is the VirtualBox source code, and you'll find the group attribute
names in
src/VBox/Frontends/VirtualBox/src/manager/chooser/UIChooserAbstractModel.cpp
(search for "go", including the quotes).
AFAIU, "go" represents an open group, "gc" represents a closed group.
I'm not sure about the roles of "n" for "name" and "nf" for "name
favorite".
Regards
fth0
Am 03.11.2021 um 10:30 schrieb Bernard Giannetti
<[email protected]>:
Hi,
I'm the author of the Ubuntu VirtualBox indicator and have some
additional questions/clarifications please...
My indicator parses the VirtualBox configuration file at
~/.config/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml to determine the virtual machines
and groups. Using only the XMLtags ExtraDataItem where
name="GUI/GroupDefinitions/*", I have assumed that:
'go=...' is a group
'm=...': is a machine UUID
I noticed between version 1.5 and 1.6 there was the addition of the
value "n=GLOBAL" which I skip; I assume this is safe to do so?
As Stéphane reported below, I have not seen the name="gc=..." before
and cannot reproduce this under version 1.5 or 1.6. Can 'gc' be
treated the same as 'go' (that is, a group)?
Thanks,
Bernard.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Stéphane Charette <[email protected]>
*Sent:*Wednesday, 3 November 2021 17:56
*To:*[email protected] <[email protected]>; Bernard
Giannetti <[email protected]>
*Subject:*VB xml format
Devs,
Is there documentation available for the VirtualBox XML file format?
Specifically, what you'd expect to find in Ubuntu at this location:
~/.config/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml
Bernard Giannetti (the author of the VirtualBox indicator on Ubuntu)
and I are trying to understand some fields and could use some
assistance. Specifically, right now we're trying to understand the
meaning of "*gc=*..." in <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/GroupDefinitions/".
Thanks,
Stéphane
--
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Stéphane Charette
about.me/stephane.charette
<https://about.me/stephane.charette?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=email_sig&utm_campaign=edit_panel&utm_content=thumb>
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