Step 4: Obtain View Objects of Server-Side Managed Objects

When you call the subroutines in the Vim package to retrieve entities from the host, the vSphere SDK for Perl runtime creates the corresponding Perl objects (view objects) locally.

Sample Script (Commented Version) uses the Opts::get_option() subroutine to assign to $entity_type the string value of the parameter that the user passes in when executing the script. Sample Script (Commented Version) then uses $entity_type as the view_type parameter in the subsequent call to Vim::find_entity_views().

# get all inventory objects of the specified type
my $entity_type = Opts::get_option('entity');
my $entity_views = Vim::find_entity_views(view_type => $entity_type);

The Vim::find_entity_views() subroutine creates a local Perl object (an array of references) from the server-side managed object of the specified entity type.

Important: This object is static and must be explicitly updated when the corresponding server-side object changes.