Fetching Objects

Fetching Infoblox objects from the Grid using the NIOS Web RESTful API is without a doubt the most common task for an administrator. When fetching objects from the Grid using WAPI, you will generally make GET request calls. These GET request calls for fetching objects from the Grid generally take the following form:

res = wapi.get('<wapi_object>', params={}, **kwargs)

The Infoblox NIOS Web RESTful API supports Options when performing GET requests to fetch data. A couple of these are shown below:

Basics

To fetch all network WAPI objects from the Grid, we'd fashion our script like the following:

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from ibx_sdk.nios.gift import Gift
from ibx_sdk.nios.exceptions import WapiRequestException

wapi = Gift(
    grid_mgr='infoblox.localdomain',
    wapi_ver='2.12',
    ssl_verify='/path/to/certfile'
)

wapi.connect(username='admin', password='infoblox')

# fetch all networks
response = wapi.get('network')

Our response above is an httpx Response object, and it will contain a number of properties and methods. The ones used most often in working with WAPI data are:

We can test the success or failure of the above request by checking for an OK status on the response object this is done like so:

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response = wapi.get('network')
if response.status_code == 200:
    log.info('yay! we succeeded')
else:
    log.error(response.text)

Let's assume we got a successful response above, to get the JSON-encoded results, all we need to do is unpack the results. Simply do the following:

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results = response.json()

Query Parameters

This code will fetch all networks (provided we don't hit the max result set limit!). A JSON response is returned by this request.

The wapi.get() method signature supports a params option (see the wapi class docs). In order to set _max_results on our previous attempt to fetch all networks, we could adjust this property as follows:

response = wapi.get('network', params={'_max_results': 10000})

The above call now sets the _max_results to 10,000 rows of data.

Filtering Requests with Query Parameters

You should always try to optimize your API fetches to your desired result set. Here's a few written examples:

• fetch all network objects which have a Grid DHCP Member named dhcp01.example.com assigned
• fetch all record:a objects from the zone example.com
• fetch all record:a objects from the example.com zone but from the external DNS view

These are filtered lists of objects instead of simply returning:

• fetch all network objects
• fetch all record:a objects

These would potentially result in exceeding our _max_results value of 1000, not to mention it would return a lot of other data we'd have to sift through to ultimately ignore. So, it's vital to write API requests to be well-thought, filtered, and optimized to your desired result set. This is done by using Query Parameters!

To fetch all network objects which have a Grid DHCP Member named dhcp01.example.com we could perform that query as follows:

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response = wapi.get(
    'network',
    params={'member': 'dhcp01.example.com'}
)

Behind the scenes, the program would generate an API request that would look something like this:

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GET https://gm.example.com/wapi/v2.5/network?member=dhcp01.example.com 

The NIOS WAPI would return all network object(s) that were configured w/ the Grid DHCP Member dhcp01.example.com on them.

To fetch all record:a objects from the zone example.com, we'd similarly write that as:

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response = wapi.get(
    'record:a',
    params={'zone': 'example.com'}
)

Query Parameters can be a set of params and you can create compound filters when requesting. To fetch all record:a from the example.com zone but from the external DNS view, we'd simply add to the previous request the view parameter as follows:

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response = wapi.get(
    'record:a',
    params={
        'zone': 'example.com',
        'view': 'external'
    }
)