On the Netconf Central http://netconfcentral.org/netconf_docs website it talks about the RFC 4743 Using NETCONF over the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). I don’t see any reference to this standard in the conf-d documentation so I am assuming it is not supported without custom configuration. Does the conf-d netconf interface support the SOAP protocol?
To use this protocol I think I would need to add the urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:soap:1.0 capability by compiling a yang model. Do you know where I could find the yang model for this standard?
ConfD does not provide support for NETCONF over SOAP directly. If you really need SOAP transport support, you would need to set ConfD to run NETCONF over TCP and write an external proxy program to then talk SOAP.
Transport protocols for NETCONF (e.g. SSH, etc.) do not have YANG models. The capability is added to the NETCONF hello RPC by the NETCONF server and is not driven by any YANG model. YANG is used to model data and not protocols.
That said, do you really have a hard requirement to use NETCONF over SOAP? This is a case of an RFC which was written but no one has really implemented it and used it in the real world. The same thing is true for NETCONF over BEEP. I have been working with ConfD and NETCONF for almost 9 years and have never seen a commercial product nor any coomercial demand to use NETCONF over SOAP. i.e. If you do implement NETCONF over SOAP, do not expect to use it to interoperate with any third party devices or NETCONF clients. Plus, you’ll have SSH support anyway since that is a MUST in the RFC.
Thanks for the confirmation regarding SOAP over NETCONF. We are testing a large yang model that is deployed on conf-d. I anticipate that the structure of the netconf xml will change many times for the lifetime of the project when the yang model changes. At the end of the project we will have hundreds of tests. It also means that we will need to continually fix the tests.
I was hoping that we could export the xsd from conf-d using confdc, and then create a wsdl file that imports the xsd which would allow us to validate the netconf xml. We are planning to use SoapUI www.soapui.org to send the netconf requests and create test suites for various scenarios.