Brocade Network OS NETCONF Operations Guide v4.1.1 - Manual (Page 37)

Network OS NETCONF Operations Guide 5
53-1003231-02
NETCONF in client/server architecture
1
FIGURE 2 NETCONF communication
The communication between the client and server consists of a series of alternating request and
reply messages. The NETCONF peers use and elements to provide transport
protocol-independent framing of NETCONF requests and responses. The NETCONF server
processes the RPC requests sequentially in the order in which they are received.
RPC request
The element is used for enclosing a NETCONF request sent from the client to the server.
Every element contains a mandatory attribute, the message-id. This attribute has a unique
value for every RPC request, and is used to associate every RPC request with the corresponding
response. The message-id value is a monotonically increasing integer string. The maximum length
of the string is 4095 characters. If the message-id is not present in the RPC request, the server
rejects the request by returning an with an element set to
“missing-attribute”.
If there are any additional attributes present in the RPC request, the NETCONF server returns them
unmodified in the corresponding RPC reply.
RPC reply
An element is sent in response to every RPC request. The element contains
the mandatory attribute message-id copied from the corresponding RPC request, along with any
additional attributes that are present in the RPC request.
For successfully processed or requests, the response data is encoded as the
content of the element.
For successfully processed or requests, the element is
encoded as the content of the element.
For unsuccessful RPC requests, one or more elements are encoded inside the
element.
NETCONF Client
(Manager)
NETCONF Server
(Device)
SSHv2 Transport,
NETCONF port, XML
RPC (For example:
Operation)
Configuration, State
data (YANG)
RPC-REPLY