The List, Get and Set Commands

The asadmin list, get and set commands work in tandem to provide a navigation mechanism for the Application Server's dotted naming hierarchy. There are two hierarchies: configuration andmonitoring and these commands operate on both. The list command provides the fully qualified dotted names of the management components that have read-only or modifiable attributes.

The configuration hierarchy provides attributes that are modifiable; whereas the attributes of management components from themonitoring hierarchy are purely read-only. Theconfiguration hierarchy is loosely based on the domain's schema document; whereas the monitoring hierarchy is a little different.

Use the list command to reach a particular management component in the desired hierarchy. Then, invoke the getand set commands to get the names and values or set the values of the attributes of the management component at hand. Use the wildcard (*) option to fetch all matches in a given fully qualified dotted name.

An Application Server dotted name uses the “.” (period) as a delimiter to separate the parts of a complete name. This is similar to how the “/” character is used to delimit the levels in the absolute path name of a file in the UNIX file system. The following rules apply while forming the dotted names accepted by the get, set, and list commands. Note that a specific command has some additional semantics applied.

• A . (period) always separates two sequential parts of the name.

• A part of the name usually identifies an application server subsystem and/or its specific instance. For example: web-container, log-service, thread-pool-1, etc.

• If any part of the name itself contains a . (period), then it must be escaped with a leading \(backslash) so that the “.” does not act like a delimiter.

• An * (asterisk) can be used anywhere in the dotted name and it acts like the wildcard character in regular expressions. Additionally, an * can collapse all the parts of the dotted name. Long dotted name like "<classname>this.is.really.long.hierarchy </classname>" can be abbreviated to "<classname>th*.hierarchy</classname>." But note that the . always delimits the parts of the name.

• On Solaris, quotes are needed when executing commands with * as the option value or operand.

• The top level switch for any dotted name is -‐monitor or -m that is separately specified on a given command line. The presence or lack of this switch implies the selection of one of the two hierarchies for application server management: monitoring and configuration.

• If you happen to know the exact complete dotted name without any wildcard character, then list and get/set have a little difference in their semantics:

  • The list command treats this complete dotted name as the complete name of a parent node in the hierarchy. Upon providing this name to the list command, it simply returns the names of the immediate children at that level. For example,list server.applications.web-module will list all the web modules deployed to the domain or the default server.

  • The get and set commands treat this complete dotted name as the fully qualified name of the attribute of a node (whose dotted name itself is the name that you get when you remove the last part of this dotted name) and it gets/sets the value of that attribute. This is true if such an attribute exists. You will never start with this case because in order to find out the names of attributes of a particular node in the hierarchy, you must use the wildcard character *. For example, server.applications.web-module.JSPWiki.context-root* returns the context-root of the web-application deployed to the domain or default server.

The list command is the progenitor of navigational capabilities of these three commands. If you want to set or get attributes of a particular application server subsystem, you must know its dotted name. The list command is the one which can guide you to find the dotted name of that subsystem. For example, to find out the modified date (attribute) of a particular file in a large file system that starts with /. First you must find out the location of that file in the file system, and then look at its attributes. Therefore, two of the first commands to understand the hierarchies in the Application Server are: * list "*" and <command>* list * -‐monitor. Consult the get, set or list commands man pages to identify the sorted output of these commands.