This update enables Red Hat Virtualization API users to request that contents of some of the entity's links be returned inline, inside the requested entity. Previously, to retrieve multiple related objects from the API, the only alternative was to retrieve the first one, then send additional requests to retrieve the related objects. For example, if you needed a virtual machine and also the disks and NICs, you would need to first send a request like this: GET /ovirt-engine/api/vms/123 And then send additional requests to get the disk attachments, the disks, and the NICs: GET /ovirt-engine/api/vms/123/diskattachments GET /ovirt-engine/api/disks/456 GET /ovirt-engine/api/disks/789 GET /ovirt-engine/api/vms/123/nics In environments with high latency, this increases the time required to retrieve the data. In addition, it also means that multiple queries have to be sent to the database to retrieve the data. To improve this, a new follow parameter has been introduced. This parameter is a list of links that the server should follow and populate. For example, the previous scenario will be solved sending this request: GET /ovirt-engine/api/vms/123?follow=diskattachments.disks,nics This will return the virtual machine with the disks and the NICs embedded in the same response, thus avoiding the multiple network round-trips. The multiple database queries will be avoided only if the server is modified to retrieve that data with the more efficient queries, otherwise the server will use the approach of calling itself to retrieve it, which won’t improve the number of queries.