Virtualmin API list-commands

Hello,

A problem I have is possibly that not all the API commands support multiline, and think there was even at least one that didn't work with json=1 which is what I am using for everything. I have worked around most of the things but I will mention those anyway.

I am creating a front end to Virtualmin which will work by completely integrating to the Virtualmin API. To do this it automatically generates the PHP code to talk to each of the functions. Therefore it can work with both the GPL or the PRO versions and adapt to any future API changes you make in Virtualmin.

It uses the list-commands API call to Virtualmin and parses this output (which doesn't have multiline) and gets the list of commands. Here is some duplicates list-commands outputs: create-simple-alias, list-simple-aliases

Hopefully the commands and their --help info are up-to-date in list-commands as this would all depend on that to work properly.

I was also wondering how/if it would be possible to use the "virtualmin help create-domain" type CLI commands in the remote API. These are different than the --help (&help=) params and contain more info that's useful in some cases. It seems to be the only part missing to create a complete, automatic, auto-adapting, Virtualmin API documentation reference guide.

I think if I am to have a complete API integration in my app then using the Virtualmin documentation to help users figure out which params are required or optional then info on what they mean and how to use them is necessary. Since Virtualmin can already output this info I guess it makes sense to use it but maybe its not the intended use for it and maybe I am not even allowed to do that?

Much of the documentation online seems outdated as I am sure you know. It doesn't really take much for it to be outdated and its hard to keep up with documentation. Maybe you have a system to output the code for it already. Maybe thats what this is? http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/developer/cli/import_api_docs

And last of all I hope to maybe also parse each of the required and optional variables for each command so that I can better filter the inputs before sending things through the PHP shell_exec command. I get this help output by issuing a &help= param to the remote API. While these all send back the help, some say there is no --help param which I have to filter out. There are two variations of it: "Unknown parameter --help" and "Unknown option --help". That's ok though because I am also filtering out the Exit status which can be useful in some cases. And I will still be able to parse the options somehow or another. But there are a couple of things I wanted to ask.

First, maybe there is a better way to parse these parameters on output from the API in the first place? If there was a way to use multiline on each param kind of so I could have an array like this:

That is the first part of the array which includes the first part of the Backup and restore section.

And second, does it say some place what the + and * and whatnot mean on some of the commands? I thought I saw something some place but I don't remember where. They don't seem to have to do with the required inputs. The required params for each function seem to be without the [] around them. And there are the | to contend with.

Cool stuff! Thanks for making this software so awesome =) Sorry this is so long. I probably forgot some stuff.