After your network has been discovered, you may want to differentiate certain devices, such as personal computers or printers, from hosts in your topology. This exercise extends the model by adding a class to represent a printer. The printer class is declared without any additional properties, other than those attributes, events, and relationships that are inherited from its parent class.

A new class is declared as a subclass of an existing ICIM class. The key is to determine which class should be the parent class. This determination is based on several factors:

  • How you want to search and report on the new class

  • Functional similarities to existing elements in topology

  • The events, attributes, and relationships the new class needs to inherit

    A printer is a physical element, on the same level as a router or a host. In this exercise, its parent class is the UnitaryComputerSystem, which is also the parent class of the router and host. A printer, router, and host all inherit the same attributes, events, and relationships from the UnitaryComputerSystem class.

    The IP Manager counts the instances of the ICIM_UnitaryComputerSystem. When your dynamic model classes inherit from ICIM_UnitaryComputerSystem, instances of that class will take advantage and participate on the full predefined IP Management Suite root cause analysis model.

    If the instances of your class do not need to participate on the full root cause analysis, you can inherit from either ICIM_System or ICIM_ComputerSystem. In addition, if you inherit from either ICIM_System or ICIM_ComputerSystem you will have to add your new class into the appropriate dxa to transfer the topology to the Global Manager. Chapter 3, “Exercise 2 - Adding an Attribute to the Router Class,” provides information about adding a class and its associated attributes to dxa files.

    In the following procedures, the syntax is the same as that used to declare any MODEL class. “Adding the new class” on page 78 provides more detail.

    Note:

    Use a unique prefix with new class names and other properties. The name must differ from existing ICIM classes and properties. “SM_” is used as a prefix in this exercise. Do not use "SM_" as this is already used by SDK.

    Unless otherwise noted, BASEDIR refers to the directory for the IP Manager.