Search VMTN with REST API

REST API are (nearly) everywhere! VMware’s VMTN website is no exception. I already did a post on Automate Your VMTN Search, but that was entirely based on constructing URI and interpreting the returned webpages. For the occasion of the PowerCLI’s 10th Birthday session at VMworld, I wanted to produce some InfoGraphs on the PowerCLI Community. For those InfoGraphs I needed to harvest data from said VMTN Community, and I looked for a better way to do this. That is where the REST API offered by the Jive software, om which the VMTN website is hosted, came in handy.

The functions I ended up with, are also a good example of how easy it is to consume REST API through PowerShell. And they also show how the basic techniques to work with REST API can be reused. Check out my VMTNRest repo.

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Automate your VMTN search

Recently I had the pleasure of doing a guest post, called Finding your way in the PowerCLI Community, on the PowerCLI blog. The subject of the post was how to find community threads, that might hold an answer to your question.

Now this wouldn’t be a PowerShell/PowerCLI blog, if I didn’t try to automate the procedure. And with a serious amount of RegEx involved, I was able to create some working code. Here it is, my Find-VMTNPowerCLI function.

Warning: pure PowerShell, no PowerCLI content !

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