Get asset count and vuln count for Asset Groups

[gschneider-r7]

Currently the Asset Group functionality in the gem does not pull down the number of assets or vulnerabilities as a field on the object. A customer has requested this functionality to match the display of the Asset Groups table in the Nexpose UI.

The current Nexpose API does not support this in a single request. Without a new API endpoint, this could be accomplished with a data table endpoint - with the caveat that it could change at any time in the future.

[erran-r7]

Should we create an experimental namespace for these types of methods?

# nexpose/experimental.rb
module Nexpose
  module Experimental
    def asset_groups_with_counts(connection)
      # Use the nexpose console connection to make both request and decorate the asset group object
    end
  end
end

Where a gem user would like to have these methods:

# Users could then monkey patch in experimental methods:
require 'nexpose/experimental'

module Nexpose::Connection
  include Nexpose::Experimental
end

[ghost]

Not sure that helps much. Is the intent to basically imply the API is unstable?

[erran-r7]

@mhuffman-r7 the intent there would be to ship a fix, but not load it by default. Customers could then use these "experimental" changes which we wouldn't support through our regular SLA. Once official Nexpose APIs are released, we could mark these methods as deprecated and point to the new methods.

[gschneider-r7]

@mhuffman-r7 implementing this would require one of the following:

• New API endpoint(s) in Nexpose, since it does not exist in 1.1 or 1.2 currently
• Multiple requests to the console to "complete" the object data in Ruby
• Use of dyntable endpoint which may change without notice in the future

The last option is the most straightforward (in fact I've provided a POC to the customer), but is likely to break if/when the dyntable is converted to something else, requiring an update to the gem.

[gschneider-r7]

Going to shelve this for now. We should implement new API endpoints in Nexpose first.