#116 Invalid CIM status code for pull operations

[Andreas Maier]

The latest SFCB returns a CIM status code CIM_ERR_FAILED when attempting to invoke one of the new pulled enumeration operations that were added in DSP0200 1.3 (https://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0200_1.3.1.pdf).

According to the DSP0200 standard, unsupported intrinsic operations must result in CIM status code CIM_ERR_NOT_SUPPORTED, and CIM_ERR_FAILED may be used only if there is no more specific status code. In this case, there is clearly a more specific status code.

The relevant section in DSP0200 is the definition of CIM status codes, where it states (from the latest version 1.4.0 of DSP0200):

• CIM_ERR_FAILED (1): A general error occurred that is not covered by a more specific error code.
• CIM_ERR_NOT_SUPPORTED (7): The requested operation is not supported on behalf of the WBEM server, or on behalf of a provided class. If the operation is supported for a provided class but is not supported for particular instances of that class, then CIM_ERR_FAILED shall be used.

This issue is important to address, because clients need to be able to fall back to using the traditional operations if a server does not support the pulled operations, and this fallback should be done based on the specific status code prescribed for this situation, and not based on a very generic status code that might have all kinds of different reasons than not supporting the operation.

Reference to the issue that triggered this bug report: https://github.com/pywbem/pywbem/issues/2736

[Andreas Maier]

One small correction: Looking at the source code of SFCB, it turns out that SFCB 1.4.5 actually introduced support for pull operations.

The SFCB version that was used in the error case was 1.3.11, which explains why it did not support them.

Still, this version, and probably any SFCB version before 1.4.5 returns the wrong status code. I di not expect that SFCB fixes the status code in these versions, but this issue can be used by users to understand that they can fix this by upgrading SFCB to 1.4.5 or newer.