3.2. Resources and Collections

A collection is a set of resources of the same type. The API provides both top-level collections and sub-collections. An example of a top-level collection is the hosts collection which contains all virtualization hosts in the environment. An example of a sub-collection is the host.nics collection which contains resources for all network interface cards attached to a host resource.

The interface for interacting with collections provides methods for adding resources (add), getting resources (get), and listing resources (list).

A resource in a RESTful API is an object with a fixed interface that also contains a set of attributes that are relevant to the specific type of resource being represented. The interface for interacting with resources provides methods for updating (update ) and deleting (delete) resources. Additionally some resources support actions specific to the resource type. An example is the approve method of Host resources.