Usage question: batching support

[randombit]

KMIP protocol supports batching operations, for example to execute the sequence locate/check/get in a single request. Is request batching supported by PyKMIP? I did not find any mention of this either way in the documentation. I see in KMIPProxy there is some support for batching but it is not clear if it works. For instance create_key_pair has a boolean batch parameter, which if true appends the batch item to self.batch_items instead of sending it immediately. But I can't find any way of causing the client to send these items in a batch.

It seems like (if batching were supported) KMIPProxy would have batch params on all of its functions, and each would do something like this:

batch_item = self._build_xxx_batch_item(...)
self.batch_items.append(batch_item)
if batch == True:
   return
request = self._build_request_message(credential, self.batch_items)
self.batch_items = []
response = self._send_and_receive_message(request) 

So that if you called several functions with batch=True they would be stored and then when the final command with batch=False is issued all of the previously batched commands are also sent for execution.

Is this totally off base? Maybe batching is supported and I am just misunderstanding something about how it works in PyKMIP? Any hints most appreciated.

[PeterHamilton]

@randombit You're pretty much spot on with your investigation into batch support. At one point we had intended to add support for it but we found that all of our requested use cases worked just fine without it, so implementation stalled. The leftovers of the feature can still be found in some of the KMIPProxy operation signatures.

Finishing up support for it wouldn't be too hard, as you outline in that code snippet. If batch support in the client(s) is something you need, I'd be happy to spend some time finishing it up.

[randombit]

We could definitely use this, so if you can add it upstream that would be lovely. Otherwise I will try to hack something sufficient for our purposes, but I don't know if what I produce would be acceptable for merging.

[PeterHamilton]

@randombit Not a problem, I'll start working on it this weekend. If it's as straightforward as I think it is, it shouldn't take more than a day or two.

[randombit]

Oh, that would be amazing! Thank you.

[PeterHamilton]

@randombit #404 is a first step toward adding batch processing support. Batch item results are not homogeneous yet though, so watch out if you attempt to test out the patch.

Long term my plan is to drop the KMIPProxy client entirely and fold everything into the ProxyKmipClient implementation, since it's a cleaner and more Pythonic interface. Next steps include cleaning up the batch results to make them homogeneous and to then expose batching in the ProxyKmipClient.