Commit 51631493 authored by Kevin Wolf's avatar Kevin Wolf
Browse files

docs: Document QAPI union types



Signed-off-by: default avatarKevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarEric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
parent 0aef92b9
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
+55 −7
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -34,9 +34,15 @@ OrderedDicts so that ordering is preserved.
There are two basic syntaxes used, type definitions and command definitions.

The first syntax defines a type and is represented by a dictionary.  There are
two kinds of types that are supported: complex user-defined types, and enums.
three kinds of user-defined types that are supported: complex types,
enumeration types and union types.

A complex type is a dictionary containing a single key who's value is a
Generally speaking, types definitions should always use CamelCase for the type
names. Command names should be all lower case with words separated by a hyphen.

=== Complex types ===

A complex type is a dictionary containing a single key whose value is a
dictionary.  This corresponds to a struct in C or an Object in JSON.  An
example of a complex type is:

@@ -47,13 +53,57 @@ The use of '*' as a prefix to the name means the member is optional. Optional
members should always be added to the end of the dictionary to preserve
backwards compatibility.

An enumeration type is a dictionary containing a single key who's value is a
=== Enumeration types ===

An enumeration type is a dictionary containing a single key whose value is a
list of strings.  An example enumeration is:

 { 'enum': 'MyEnum', 'data': [ 'value1', 'value2', 'value3' ] }

Generally speaking, complex types and enums should always use CamelCase for
the type names.
=== Union types ===

Union types are used to let the user choose between several different data
types.  A union type is defined using a dictionary as explained in the
following paragraphs.


A simple union type defines a mapping from discriminator values to data types
like in this example:

 { 'type': 'FileOptions', 'data': { 'filename': 'str' } }
 { 'type': 'Qcow2Options',
   'data': { 'backing-file': 'str', 'lazy-refcounts': 'bool' } }

 { 'union': 'BlockdevOptions',
   'data': { 'file': 'FileOptions',
             'qcow2': 'Qcow2Options' } }

In the QMP wire format, a simple union is represented by a dictionary that
contains the 'type' field as a discriminator, and a 'data' field that is of the
specified data type corresponding to the discriminator value:

 { "type": "qcow2", "data" : { "backing-file": "/some/place/my-image",
                               "lazy-refcounts": true } }


A union definition can specify a complex type as its base. In this case, the
fields of the complex type are included as top-level fields of the union
dictionary in the QMP wire format. An example definition is:

 { 'type': 'BlockdevCommonOptions', 'data': { 'readonly': 'bool' } }
 { 'union': 'BlockdevOptions',
   'base': 'BlockdevCommonOptions',
   'data': { 'raw': 'RawOptions',
             'qcow2': 'Qcow2Options' } }

And it looks like this on the wire:

 { "type": "qcow2",
   "readonly": false,
   "data" : { "backing-file": "/some/place/my-image",
              "lazy-refcounts": true } }

=== Commands ===

Commands are defined by using a list containing three members.  The first
member is the command name, the second member is a dictionary containing
@@ -65,8 +115,6 @@ An example command is:
   'data': { 'arg1': 'str', '*arg2': 'str' },
   'returns': 'str' }

Command names should be all lower case with words separated by a hyphen.


== Code generation ==