NITRO API JSON schema from NITRO Java Client

NITRO is a REST API to program the Citrix NetScaler load balancer. While there are Java and Python clients, it is somewhat difficult to write new clients since the JSON payloads are not well documented. This project reverse engineers the JSON schema from the Nitro Java SDK, then enables a roundtrip to Golang structs. (Golang SDK is currently work-in-progress here )

This repo is stale

There is no official support for generating jsonschema from NITRO. The most up to date schema is usually available at https://github.com/citrix/adc-nitro-go

Pre-requisites

• JDK 7+
• Maven

Usage

First, we have to install a custom JSON schema generator forked from JJSchema.

CURRWD=$PWD
## install jjschema-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar in ~/.m2/
git clone https://github.com/chiradeep/JJSchema.git
cd JJSchema
mvn install

##go back 
cd $CURRWD

## build our SchemaGenerator
mvn package

## Run
mvn exec:exec

## json is now in $CURRWD/json

NOTE: This uses the NITRO jar available on Sonatype maven repository (may not be the latest)

JSON schema to Golang

You can use the generated schema to generate Golang structs:

./generate.sh $GOPATH/github.com/chiradeep/go-nitro/netscaler

Thanks to Generate from Adrian. A Go client to NetScaler that uses this generated code is here: https://github.com/chiradeep/go-nitro

Gory Details

The fork from JJSchema was necessary since the NITRO Java SDK followed a different convention for getters: instead of getFoo(), it uses get_foo(). Another useful hack was to figure out which elements in the JSON were read-only (those without a corresponding set_ method). Last but not least, the Java code provides enum-like inner classes for various fields. For example, a persistencetype field in lbvserver has a corresponding persistencetypeEnum inner class. The inner class has constants for the possible values. This fork from JJSchema uses this to determine the enums in the JSON schema.

The Golang generator is vanilla from Generate. Note that it doesn't take advantage of the enum or readonly fields generated in the schema. One way to do this would be to add to the json tag: instead of json:"fieldname", it could be json:"fieldname",readonly:"true",enum:"foo,bar,ugly"

Sample Schema:

{
  "type" : "object",
  "properties" : {
    "ipaddress" : {
      "type" : "string"
    },
    "katimeout" : {
      "type" : "integer"
    },
    "lbuid" : {
      "type" : "string"
    },
    "port" : {
      "type" : "integer"
    },
    "secure" : {
      "type" : "string",
      "enum" : [ "YES", "NO" ],
      "readonly" : true
    },
    "state" : {
      "type" : "string",
      "enum" : [ "ACTIVE", "INACTIVE", "UNKNOWN" ],
      "readonly" : true
    },
    "wlmname" : {
      "type" : "string"
    }
  },
  "$schema" : "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/schema#",
  "id" : "lbwlm",
  "title" : "lbwlm"
}

Sample Go code:

package lb

type Lbwlm struct {
  Ipaddress string `json:"ipaddress,omitempty"`
  Katimeout int `json:"katimeout,omitempty"`
  Lbuid string `json:"lbuid,omitempty"`
  Port int `json:"port,omitempty"`
  Secure string `json:"secure,omitempty"`
  State string `json:"state,omitempty"`
  Wlmname string `json:"wlmname,omitempty"`
}