what is the best way to debug vCloud client REST applications?

Question

You already mentioned you have access to the message stream, which is one of the first steps. Typically if I'm using the Apache HttpClient/HttpComponents I'll go increase the log level so it logs the full HTTP requests.

My next step is usually to cheat and to log into vCD as a system administrator and see what's going on. When vCD was designed there was a very deliberate decision to not reveal infrastructure level problems to tenants of the cloud (normal org users or org admins), as that would break the cloud abstraction. Sadly, that means as an org-level user you're often going to get "contact your cloud admin" error responses. We are aware that this isn't ideal and try to find ways to make it better when we can (IIRC the new 5.5 release that was announced last month does have some improvements in that area).

The last step is usually to cheat even more and to look at the server side logs (vcloud-container-debug.log, specifically). That usually gives me a better clue as to what went wrong. Of course, you may be unlucky and not have access to the vCD cell machine.

My workaround in the latter two cases is to try the operations via the vCD UI and see (1) if they work as expected and (2) if they do, to check the system state via the API and see if I'm sending the wrong request payloads, etc. because the doc or schema reference may not have been clear enough.

In regards to the documentation, please use the feedback links () found on individual doc pages to let us know! Our technical writer reviews all the feedback and tries to address them.

My final suggestion is that you might want to post API questions to the vCloud API community forum VMware has. There are a number of experts (both users and VMware employees) that monitor it and respond to questions.