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The YANG-API protocol is a REST-full API to allow WEB application developers to manage networking devices.  It is designed to co-exist with the NETCONF protocol, and other device management access methods such as CLI or WEBui. It was published as an Internet Draft, called draft-bierman-netconf-yang-api-00.txt.

The YANG-API protocol uses HTTP operations to access the server as a hierarchy of conceptual resources. These resources are defined with the YANG data modeling language. The NETCONF protocol and YANG-API protocol use the exact same YANG data modules to define the schema for the message content in each protocol. The actual operations and data format are different in each protocol (e.g., NETCONF <get-config> is like HTTP GET).

YANG-API vs. NETCONF Operations

YANG-API will also allow application developers to access custom <rpc> operations defined in YANG. The HTTP POST operation is used for this purpose. MIME media types are used for different types of conceptual data. For example, an <rpc> operation encoded in JSON is identified with the ContentType of “application/vnd.yang.data+json”.

The following example shows the retrieval of the ‘jukebox’ resource. Note that only 1 depth level is returned by default.

 This example operation would retrieve 2 levels of configuration data
   nodes that exist within the top-level "jukebox" resource.

      GET /yang-api/datastore/jukebox?depth=2 HTTP/1.1
      Host: example.com
      Accept: application/vnd.yang.data+json

   The server might respond:

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:11:30 GMT
      Server: example-server
      Cache-Control: no-cache
      Pragma: no-cache
      Content-Type: application/vnd.yang.data+json

      {
        "jukebox" : {
          "library" : {
            "artist" : {
              "index" : 1,
              "name" : "Foo Fighters"
            }
          },
          "player" : {
            "gap" : 0.5
          }
        }
      }

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2012 at 11:06 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.