Adding a WMI Property

Properties in WMI classes describe data about a managed object. For example, Handle, ProcessId, and PageFaults are defined as properties of the Win32_Process class and describe aspects of an operating system process. For more information, see Writing a Property Provider.

Defining a Property in MOF

A WMI property represents an aspect or state in the object. Rather than create methods that simply get and set a value, you can create a property. For example, the NetEnabled property of Win32_NetworkAdapter displays whether the state of the adapter is enabled or disabled. However, the Enable and Disable methods actually perform the action of changing the adapter state.

A property must have a data type. The data type of the Win32_Process property Handle is string and the data type of PageFaults is uint32. If a property can have only two states, the data type of the property is normally set to boolean.

The property may also be an array. For example, the security identifier (SID) property of Win32_Trustee is a byte array (uint8) that contains the SID. Properties can contain embedded objects which are references to one or more instances of another WMI class. The discretionary access control list (DACL) and system access control list (SACL) properties of Win32_SecurityDescriptor, for example, are arrays of Win32_ACE objects that describe the groups and accounts that have access. The Group property in Win32_SecurityDescriptor contains a reference to a single instance of Win32_Trustee. For more information, see Embedding Objects in a Class.

A property may have several qualifiers. These qualifiers may be Common Information Model (CIM) or WMI qualifiers or may be specific to certain types of classes, for example, the performance Counter class qualifiers. Qualifiers specify some aspect of the property, such as if it is read-only or if it cannot be changed without a specific privilege. An application which attempts to write to the Win32_SecurityDescriptorDACL property, for example, requires the privileges SeSecurityPrivilege and SeRestorePrivilege. For more information, see Adding a Qualifier.

Finally, a property must have a name. You may name a property anything within the bounds of standard programming practice. However, there are two main exceptions. First, you may not use any MOF keyword, such as "class", as a property name. Second, you may not use any WQL keywords, such as "group", as a property name either. For more information on MOF and WQL keywords, see MOF Data Types and WQL (SQL for WMI).

For both C++ and Managed Object Format (MOF) code, you declare the properties of a class at the same time that you declare the class.

To define a property

• Include the property data type, name, and an optional default value and qualifier between the curly braces of the class description.

  class MyClass 
  {
      [key] string   strProp;
      sint32         dwProp1 = 21;
      uint32         dwProp2;
  };
  

  The MyClass class in the preceding example has three properties: a character string, a 32-bit signed integer, and a 32-bit unsigned integer. Each property is assigned a case-insensitive name and a MOF data type.

  The Key qualifier defines the string property as the key property that uniquely identifies an instance of the class. For more information about qualifiers, see Adding a Qualifier.

Related topics

Creating a Class