Generate NSX ALB CSRFToken in Orchestrator

To get the value from cookie in orchestrator was a little new to me. I have never done this earlier or even seen any example.

I got a requirement to get create automation workflow for deleting Service Engine Groups in VMware NSX ALB (formerly Avi Networks) and for that I was using REST API instead of the Avi Controller plugin for vRO which felt half-baked to me and I couldn’t use it properly for my use case.

The first requirement for using ALB REST API is to pass a CSRFToken in each subsequent POST/PUT/DELETE call after you login using your credentials.

I did the API trial on Postman and started wokring on creating an action but I just couldn’t figure out how this CSRFToken is being generated and shown in the Cookies section in Postman. I started wondering how would I replicate this in Orchestrator.

After spending a good time, I got my answer. We can simply get the values in cookies by accessing them from the REST Transient host object as seen in this below script.

var restHost = RESTHostManager.createHost("DynamicRequest");
restHost.url = "https://alb_fqdn";
var transientHost = RESTHostManager.createTransientHostFrom(restHost)
var credentials =  {'username': 'user1',
    'password': 'pa$$w0rd!'};
var stringifiedCredentials = JSON.stringify(credentials);
var request = transientHost.createRequest("POST", "/login", stringifiedCredentials); 
request.contentType = "application/json";

var response = request.execute();
System.log("getNsxAlbToken action response code: " + response.statusCode);
if(response.statusCode == 200){
    for each (var i in transientHost.cookies){
        if(i.name == "csrftoken") return i.value;
    }
} else throw "getNsxAlbToken action response code is not 200. Check credentials or url. Cannot Proceed!";

It was a nice quick trick unless you know it. Hence, I have shared it here for everyone else. I hope you like it. Thanks for reading.

Link to AVi REST API Guide is here.