Multi-Machine Blueprint- How to share IPs, passwords, etc..

Question

I am trying to configure a multi-machine deployment in Application Director. I want the machines to have each others IPs, db passwords, and things like that. So they can all run together in a little environment hosting apps and websites. I am looking for help on how to share these variables with all the VMs in the blueprint. I see some out of the box examples in App D, but I don't find a properties dictionary or any docs that explain how to accomplish this. I have attached a pic to show what VMware has done out of the box. Notice the "appserver_node_ips" and the text in the value column.
Does anybody know how to set this up or where to get info that explains these properties and their options?

Answer 1

You can use component dependencies to share property values between components. E.g.
Say I have a node which will have 2 app components on it.
Component c1 has properties
p1
p2
Component c2 has properties
p3
p4
p1copy
p2copy
If you look in the upper right of the Blueprint builder there is a chain icon which lets you define dependencies between components (either on the same nodes or different ones)
With a dependency in place between my example components (c2 depends on c1) we can then bind the p1copy property value in c2  to the value in c1 in the following notation
self:c1.p1
This expression breaks down as
<node name>:<component name>:<property name>
Quite simple and very powerful
Also, there are some built-ins for each node such as
self:ip
self:hostname
etc.
This is all mostly in the docs but you'll wrap your head around it pretty quickly if you play about with it