Hi Klaus,
I'm using the following python code snippet to retrieve the relevant
information from running "VBoxManage list vms --long":
result = subprocess.run( "VBoxManage list vms --long", stdout =
subprocess.PIPE, shell = True ).stdout.decode()
for line in result.splitlines():
if line.startswith( "Name:" ):
name = line.split( "Name:" )[ 1 ].strip()
elif line.startswith( "Groups:" ):
groups = line.split( '/' )[ 1 : ]
elif line.startswith( "UUID:" ):
uuid = line.split( "UUID:" )[ 1 ].strip()
print( name, groups, uuid )
Didn't take long to knock up the above code and I'm now in the middle of
massaging the nested group information into an internal Python object to
represent each machine/group. I did this already in a different fashion when
parsing the XML file, so hopefully won't take me too long...
I developed my indicator in 2012 and have noticed changes in format within the
XML file over the years. Nothing too drastic, but given the undocumented
nature of the file, I was always slightly nervous. I have avoided legacy data
by always moving with the supported versions of VirtualBox, currently 5 and 6,
but I'm not 100% confident that will always work as the XML file still does
support very old config files and is not publicly documented...not ideal
conditions for parsing!
I have taken a look at the output of running "VBoxManage showvminfo uuid
--machinereadable" and whilst it looks slightly easier to retrieve the
information, it does have the disadvantage of needing to poll every VM. I
implement this way and compare with that above to see how long it takes in
comparison. But regardless, I feel using the VBoxManage command(s) is the way
to go...
I wasn't able to easily determine how to access the Python bindings/API. I did
download the SDK and after cursorily reading the documentation I suspect each
user of my indicator also needs part of the SDK (I can package it up but now
there are more moving parts than I care for and I'm not even sure of the
licensing).
Fingers crossed the VBoxManage approach(es) are stable and long term!
Thanks again,
Bernard.
________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on
behalf of Klaus Espenlaub <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, 5 November 2021 05:03
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [vbox-dev] VB xml format
Hi Bernard,
On 2021-11-04 09:11, Bernard Giannetti wrote:
Hi Stéphane, fth0, Klaus,
Thanks for your responses. I have done some digging/reading...
Looking at
https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Frontends/VirtualBox/src/manager/chooser/UIChooserAbstractModel.cpp
and the functions prefixToString() and optionToString(), I see the characters
that define group and machine, but there are some other characters which don't
make sense...but that I don't believe affects my situation. That 'gc' and 'go'
both refer to groups, that fixes my immediate issue.
Longer term, I will ditch parsing the XML configuration file as this is chasing
my tail at best! After some investigation, I believe I can use:
VBoxManage list vms --long
to give me each machine's name, UUID and group. Hopefully this works as
expected as this is preferable to calling the API via a COM wrapper or the web
server interface.
My recommendation would be using the Python API bindings since that's rather
convenient, balancing flexibility with pretty limited impact from API changes
(that said, the Python API bindings may not be available in a certain
VirtualBox installation, depending on how annoying the support of a specific
Linux distro's Python 2/3 migration strategy is).
If you insist using "VBoxManage" (one of the main source of useless error
reports e.g. from Vagrant fans) then I would at least hope you go for an
approach which will be a little more reliable ("VBoxManage list vms --long"
produces human readable output, i.e. it can change relatively arbitrarily): go
for a two-stage approach. First get the list of VM UUIDs with "VBoxManage list
vms", and then get the detail information you need with "VBoxManage showvminfo
uuid --machinereadable". The output of the latter should be a lot easier to
process. It is kind of a list of shell variables (anything with an all
lowercase name is the associated VBoxManage modifyvm option name, anything
mixed case has no direct correspondence), with string values possibly
containing spaces in "".
In principle this could be also offered with "VBoxManage list vms --long", but
so far no one has thought of this and therefore it wouldn't work for existing
VirtualBox releases.
Klaus
Thanks again for the help,
Bernard.
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