when to use special <get> RPC methods

[Andy Bierman <andy@andybierman.com>]

Hi,

This issue that Phil raised about never using special get
functions because we already defined <get>, is not quite accurate.

There are lots of use cases where a special get function would
be better than using <get>:

  - get-my-session-config paired with set-my-session-config
    Setting per-session knobs are not really supported in NETCONF.
    This would require a table of all the sessions, and then
    lots of access-control configuration to make sure that only
    session X got to access session[X].knobs.  It is much easier
    to use dedicated RPCs and not use <get> or the config database
    at all, for 'my-session' sort of features.
  - deep nested tables with complex keys would be good candidates
    for additional <get-foo> functions.
  - Info which might require the manager to retrieve a lot of data,
    scan it, follow data pointers, and retrieve secondary data.
  - Special reports that are gathered, based on some input parameters,
    processed by the agent (e.g., aggregation), and then some data is returned.

The example at hand is some plain-old statistics in a container,
root under the /netconf element.  The Xpath and subtree filtering
is sufficient for this data, and a special <get-foo> for '/netconf/foo'
seems rather excessive.


Andy



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