Operations Manager Data Queries Overview

Article
05/03/2011

Applies To: Operations Manager 2007 R2, Operations Manager 2007 SP1, System Center Operations Manager 2007

The Operations Manager class libraries provide classes to encapsulate data for Operations Manager components and methods for accessing the data from an SDK client. For example, to get information about the Management Packs that are installed in a Management Group, you can use the GetManagementPacks method. The method returns a read-only collection of ManagementPack objects, each of which contains data about a specific Management Pack.

Filtering Data

Many of the methods that retrieve Operations Manager data accept a criteria object as an argument. Criteria objects use a string expression to filter the results that are returned by the method.

For example, to narrow the results that are returned by the GetManagementPacks method, you can construct a ManagementPackCriteria object to filter the Management Packs by name, as follows:

string qStr = "Name = 'Microsoft.SystemCenter.NTService.Library'";
ManagementPackCriteria mpCriteria = new ManagementPackCriteria(qStr);
ReadOnlyCollection<ManagementPack> mps = mg.GetManagementPacks(mpCriteria);

In this example, the method queries the data for a single Management Pack with a specific name.

Getting Valid Properties for Use in Criteria Expressions

The properties that you can use in the criteria expression vary depending on the type of objects that are returned by the method. In the previous example, the expression used the Management Pack's Name property to filter the results. Other Management Pack properties that could have been used include Id, Sealed, Version, LastModified, and TimeCreated (among others).

You can obtain a list of the valid properties for any criteria type by using the GetValidPropertyNames method. For example, to obtain a collection of valid property names for use in defining a criteria expression, you could use the following method:

ReadOnlyCollection<string> validProperties = ManagementPackCriteria.GetValidPropertyNames();

If a criteria expression is not valid, the SDK Service throws an InvalidCriteriaException, which you can catch in your SDK client to revise the expression.

For information about the operators you can use in criteria expressions, see Criteria Expression Syntax.