WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud
  • Tanzu
    • Application Modernization
    • Tanzu services
    • Tanzu Community Edition
    • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
    • vSphere with Tanzu
  • Home Lab
  • Nested Virtualization
  • Apple
You are here: Home / Automation / Quick Tip - Offline viewing of vSphere API & other API docs using Dash

Quick Tip - Offline viewing of vSphere API & other API docs using Dash

06.06.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

As a frequent consumer of the vSphere API, a must have bookmark for all my systems (work/personal) is the vSphere API Reference document. In my opinion, This is a must have for anyone that is serious about vSphere Automation and having it be an online document, it allows you to quickly search for a specific property or method. The problem with an online document of course is that if you are not connected to the internet, you will not have access to it. VMware does provides an offline version for viewing which is bundled within the vSphere Management SDK.

This morning when I woke up, I was going through the list of sites that I read on a regular basis such as Y Hacker News and the top entry at the moment was "Dash - Beautiful instance offline docs for almost everything". I quickly realized this was not the first time I had heard of this tool, my good friend Timo Sugliani had actually introduced me to Dash a couple months back and he even mentioned it might be possible to view the vSphere API documents. After installing Dash, I did not see the vSphere API docs from what I recall and I just never had time to play with it again. I figure it has been awhile, maybe I should give it another try? I updated Dash this morning to latest version and noticed that the vSphere API documentation is now available and covers vSphere 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5.

dash-documentation-1
Once you have downloaded the specific vSphere API documentation, you can then quickly browse or search through the different class objects, methods, properties and enumeration values. You can see from the screenshot below, it will automatically search through all your documentation include online searches on such as Google and Stack Overflow which I thought was pretty neat.

dash-documentation-2
In addition to being able to easily view the vSphere API documentation offline, but you can also view other types of API documentation. Dash currently supports over 290+ documentation sets and you can even create your own doc sets and contribute them back to Dash. The other neat thing about Dash which I have not tried yet is the plugin integration with popular IDEs like Sublime, Textmate, Eclipse to just name a few. The only downside I see at the moment is that Dash is only for Mac OSX, but it looks like there might be plans to support a Windows version later this year. If you work with a lot of API documentation, Dash might be something you may want to check out. I know I will start leveraging it when I am offline.

More from my site

  • PowerCLI script to help correlate vCenter, ESXi & vSAN build/versions w/o manual VMware KB lookup
  • How to efficiently transfer files to Datastore in vCenter using the vSphere API?
  • Auditing vMotion Migrations
  • Inventory standalone ESXi host core count for vSphere+
  • Finding vCenter Cloud Gateway Deployments in your environment

Categories // Automation, vSphere Tags // dash, documentation, vSphere, vSphere API

Thanks for the comment! Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

Connect

  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 5.0 running on Intel NUC 06/08/2023
  • Clearing TPM alarms after replacing TPM chip or resetting TPM keys for ESXi 06/07/2023
  • Workaround for VMware Cloud Builder 10GbE pre-check in VMware Cloud Foundation 5.0 06/06/2023
  • Custom vCenter Server Role using vSphere Terraform Provider on VMware Cloud on AWS 06/05/2023
  • Will this Arm SoC work with ESXi-Arm? 06/02/2023

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2023

 

Loading Comments...