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 <rpc> and <rpc-reply> 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 <rpc> element is used for enclosing a NETCONF request sent from the client to the server.
Every <rpc> 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 <rpc-error> with an <error-tag> 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 <rpc-reply> element is sent in response to every RPC request. The <rpc-reply> 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 <get> or <get-config> requests, the response data is encoded as the
content of the <rpc-reply> element.
For successfully processed <edit-config> or <close-session> requests, the <ok> element is
encoded as the content of the <rpc-reply> element.
For unsuccessful RPC requests, one or more <rpc-error> elements are encoded inside the
<rpc-reply> element.
NETCONF Client
(Manager)
NETCONF Server
(Device)
SSHv2 Transport,
NETCONF port, XML
RPC (For example: <edit-config>
Operation)
Configuration, State
data (YANG)
RPC-REPLY