Did I tell you how much I love yield return?
One of the peculiar VIX COM API constructs is the combination that returns arrays of properties. This is done with two functions: GetNumProperties and GetNthProperties. The first returns the number of property arrays returned by the job and the second fetches a property array at a given index. The first obvious step is to wrap the functions within the job class.
public T GetNthProperties<T>(int index, object[] properties) {
object result = null;
VMWareInterop.Check(_handle.GetNthProperties(index, properties, ref result));
return (T) result;
}
public int GetNumProperties(int property) {
return _handle.GetNumProperties(property);
}
We can now write such properties as RunningVirtualMachines.
public IEnumerable<VMWareVirtualMachine> RunningVirtualMachines {
get
{
VMWareJob job = new VMWareJob(_handle.FindItems(
Constants.VIX_FIND_RUNNING_VMS, null, -1, null));
job.Wait(VMWareInterop.Timeouts.FindItemsTimeout);
object[] properties = { Constants.VIX_PROPERTY_FOUND_ITEM_LOCATION };
for (int i = 0; i < job.GetNumProperties((int) properties[0]); i++)
{
yield return this.Open(
(string) job.GetNthProperties<object[]>(
i, properties)[0]);
}
}
}
This is still not good enough. Let’s combine the number of results and the results themselves in a YieldWait method.
public IEnumerable<object[]> YieldWait(object[] properties, int timeoutInSeconds) {
Wait(timeoutInSeconds);
for (int i = 0; i < GetNumProperties((int)properties[0]); i++)
{
yield return GetNthProperties<object[]>(i, properties);
}
}
This results in a nice improvement over the previous implementation: we’re interating over a resultset rather than calling methods for how many results are available and to fetch each result.
public IEnumerable<VMWareVirtualMachine> RunningVirtualMachines {
get
{
VMWareJob job = new VMWareJob(_handle.FindItems(
Constants.VIX_FIND_RUNNING_VMS, null, -1, null));
object[] properties = { Constants.VIX_PROPERTY_FOUND_ITEM_LOCATION };
foreach (object[] runningVirtualMachine in job.YieldWait(
properties, VMWareInterop.Timeouts.FindItemsTimeout))
{
yield return this.Open((string) runningVirtualMachine[0]);
}
}
}