Automatic Generation of SMI Providers

An SMI Provider must support the numerous classes defined as part of the storage profiles. The Provider is usually in the form of a DLL attached to a CIM Object Manager. It is used to make the instances of these classes available to the SMI clients to provide management of the storage device. It is cumbersome to write the code to support all of these classes. A method is described that will generate the provider code automatically based upon the descriptions in the MOF files. This is done through additions to the Simple WBEM open source code to provide functions that implement the intrinsic interfaces to store, retrieve, modify, enumerate, and associate the instances through references. A build procedure is defined that uses these functions to generate provider code for each class, and combine them into a single DLL.

Learning Objectives

Describe the additions to Simple WBEM used to provide the intrinsic interfaces.
Describe how the instances are stored and retrieved from memory.
Describe how a fully-formed provider for a class is generated.
Describe how the class providers are combined in a DLL.