Mastering CloudForms Automation

Chapter 11. Ways of Entering Automate

We are starting to see how powerful CloudForms Automate can be, so let’s look at the various ways that we can initiate an automation operation.

There are six methods that we generally use to launch into Automate to run our instances or initiate our custom workflows. The method that we choose determines the Automate Datastore entry point and the objects that are available to our method when it runs.

Buttons and Simulation

So far we have launched automation scripts in two ways: from Simulation and from a custom button. With either of these methods we were presented with a drop-down list of entry points under /System/Process into the Automate Datastore (see Figure 11-1).

Figure 11-1. Entry points into the Automate Datastore from Simulation

In practice we only use /System/Process/Request to launch our own automation requests from a button or Simulation. Entries at /System/Process/Request get redirected to the Request instance name that we specified with the call, which should be an instance in the /System/Request namespace. In our examples so far, we’ve used Request instances of Call_Instance and AddCustomAttribute (which we added to our ACME domain).

Note

The usage of /System/Process/Event has changed with CloudForms 4.0. We would need to pass an EventStream object with our request to use this entry point.

The /System/Process/Automation entry ...