thin-edge.io Operations plugins should inter-operate with C8y's "thin-edge.io device management" App

The softwareag repos on github contain two examples that demonstrate the advanced Device Management features of Cumulocity IoT:

1. https://github.com/SoftwareAG/cumulocity-devicemanagement-docker-example

2. https://github.com/SoftwareAG/cumulocity-devicemanagement-agent

(1) in particular works in combination with the thin-edge Device Management web app (https://github.com/SoftwareAG/cumulocity-devicemanagement-example-web-app) to allow a Cumulocity user to manipulate locally-running Docker containers using Operations.

The methodology appears to be:

• A notification of the creation of an Operation is published on one of the below topics, so that it's accessible to a device connected via MQTT.

  • s/ds, or

  • s/dc/c8y_ThinEdge

• In response, the demo device makes a REST connection to retrieve the details of the pending Operation, as a JSON document.

• The Operation is processed based on the contents of the JSON document.

  • A REST call updates the status of the Operation to "EXECUTING"

  • The operation is processed on the device side

  • A REST call updates the status of the Operation to "SUCCESSFUL" (or "FAILED", if an error occurred).

We would like to integrate the functionality of the thin-edge.io Device Management App using Operations plugins on thin-edge.io.

However, the notifications of operations of type c8y_Docker and c8y_ThinEdge_Model (defined by the Web App) never reach the MQTT broker of thin-edge.io - either on topic "c8y/s/ds" or "c8y/s/dc/c8y_ThinEdge". Indeed, they don't appear to be published by thin-edge.io at all.

This means we can't trap the operations in thin-edge.io's plugin framework. We're not sure if thin-edge.io isn't transferring these messages across the MQTT bridge, or whether the issue relates to how the Web App publishes the operations (or not) as SmartRest messages.