Part of what I am doing these days is integrating Red Hat CloudForms / ManageIQ with the Men and Mice IP address management (IPAM) application. In order to reduce gem dependencies, reduce duplication, and handle some architecture issues I have been working on a client gem that uses the JSON-RPC API provided by Men and Mice. If you are using Ruby and want to integrate with M&M please check out the gem and provide any feedback you have through Github issues.

As I do Automate development on RedHat CloudForms I am seeing a lot of copy/paste code which is the opposite of DRY. Our process was to put commonly used code in a starting template for an Automate method. This is nice because someone new to development gains the experience of a nice starting point, but it results in a lot of extra code. We also lose the benefit of bug fixes to the helper methods.

I want to use the values from the ProvisionRequestQuotaVerification instance. The problem is that using $evm.instantiate will cause the code to run. This results in an exception or error. Digging around I found 1 $evm.instance_get(path) Which works as long as you know the full path including the domain, but then you can not rely on domain inheritance. 1 my_instance = $evm.instance_get("/ManageIQ/Infrastructure/VM/Provisioning/StateMachines/ProvisionRequestQuotaVerification/default") Here is my current workaround:

For me, one of the easier ways to begin to learn something is to learn by example. Even if the example does not solve my exact problem, I can use it to figure out ways of extracting the information I need and patterns for implementing new functionality. As a response to a forum question regarding provisioning approvals, Kevin Morey pointed out a Github repository that I was unaware of (https://github.com/ramrexx/CloudFormsPOC). This repo is a great source of example code to get you started exploring more advanced usage of CloudForms.