[core] Additional CORECONF Comments

[Vojtech Vilimek <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

I found a crucial bug in the CORECONF: You can discover all the schema 
nodes of given model in the yang-library or .well-known/core but how do 
you discover instances of a list? For example in the following YANG model.

module list-inst {
   prefix t;
   namespace "http://example.com";

   list instance {
     key "name";

     leaf "name" { type string; }
     leaf "value" { type uint32; }
   }
}

How do you discover existence of let's say instance with name "hidden" 
(i.e. "/list-inst:instance[name="hidden"]" 'instance-identifier')? You 
can use a GET method but the overhead for non-trivial YANG models is 
going to kill any reasonable real-world usage (IMHO). The overhead is 
huge because the GET will send the whole datastore (meaning all 
available instance data nodes).

Also note that "/list-inst:instance" is not valid 'instance-identifier' 
as it does not encode all list keys. The exactly same problem is with 
using SIDs but less human readable. The only thing that changes is 
instead of "/list-inst:instance" we use SID like 60,000.

I find that the protocol should be extended with ability to enumerate 
list instances and ability to get length of the instance list (and 
leaf-lists).

Just that I am curious, how is this done in RESTCONF?


Best regards,

Vojtech Vilimek
CZ.NIC z.s.p.o.
Czech Republic