How to Find a vCO Workflow ID

Recently while working on my blog post Leveraging vCD + vCO + Wavemaker Part 1, I needed to find the workflowId for the workflow I created in vCenter Orchestrator. The workflowId as one would expect is just a unique identifier for vCO to keep track of all the workflows in the system. When using the vCO Java Client, the workflowId is not something users need to worry about as the workflow names are presented through the client. Though if you are using the vCO API, such as calling the executeWorkflow method, then you will need to know the ID of the given workflow.

There are several ways you can locate the workflowId, here are three different methods:

After creating/editing a workflow, the vCO Java Client creates .vmware directory with some files locally in your home directory. (e.g. in Windows it would be under %userprofile%)

There is a file called "[username]-edited-list.xml" which contains a list of the most recently edited workflows.

When you open the file, you will noticed the very last entry is the workflow that you just created/edited and it displays only the workflowId but not the name. Assuming you are not using a shared account or logging in with same username, this is quick/dirty way of retrieving the workflowId but no easy way to confirm that it is in fact the workflow you are inquiring about.

In the vCO Configuration page, you can enable "DEBUG" logging which will also capture all workflow execution as part of the verbose output including both the name of the workflow that was executed and it's ID within the logs. Once you have captured the workflowId, you can easily revert "DEBUG" mode to "INFO" mode and does not require a restart of the vCO service.

Lastly, you can actually create a workflow in vCO to find the workflowId for a given workflow. Just create a new workflow and give it a name and configure it to take an input string for the name of the workflow and output string for the workflowId.

Here is the vCO script that queries for all workflow's and queries for the specific workflow in question:

Here is what you will see as the output when running the getWorkflowId workflow:

Method 4 (Thanks to Jorg Lew) :
You can actually retrieve the workflow ID by just selecting the workflow in the vCO Java Client and pressing CTRL+C (keyboard copy shortcut) and then pasting that into text editor. This will actually display the XML-representation of the workflow.

There are multiple ways to retrieve the workflowId in vCO, but method #4 is definitely what I would recommend as it is the easiest method within the vCO Java Client.