I'm looking through the dbus api for Network Manager and there are methods with inputs of type a{sa{sv}}.
I'm still new to dbus but if I'm interpreting the definition of signature specifiers in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/sd_bus_message_read.html# correctly this is:
What practically is this for? A name-paginated list of named settings? I'm seeing it all over the place in this API.
It turns out this is what I guess should be called a "Settings" in Network Manager. For several methods instead of building a connection setting by setting an entire set of settings are added all at once. Here's a tabbed and commented version of the settings of my current connection as queried for example:
5
"connection" 5
"id" s "Profile 1"
"permissions" as o //<empty array of strings>
"timestamp" t 1661376049
"type" s "802-3-ethernet"
"uuid" s <not posting for privacy>
"802-3-ethernet" 3
"auto-negotiate" b false
"mac-address-blacklist" as 0
"s390-options" a{ss} 0
"ipv4" 6
"address-data" aa{sv} 0
"addresses" aau 0
"dns-search" as 0
"method" s "auto"
"route-data" aa{sv} 0
"routes" aau 0
"ipv6" 7
"addr-gen-mode" i 1
"address-data" aa{sv} 0
"addresses" a(ayuay) 0
"dns-search" as 0
"method" s "auto"
"route-data" aa{sv} 0
"routes" a(ayuayu) 0
"proxy" 0
I think most of these are defaults so the real settings you might set when creating a connection are probably something like:
4
"connection" 4
"id" s "Profile Foo"
"timestamp" t <whatever, maybe this is autogenerated>
"type" s "802-3-ethernet"
"uuid" s <might be auto generated too>
"802-3-ethernet" 0
"ipv4" 1
"method" s "auto"
"ipv6" 1
"addr-gen-mode" i 1
"method" s "auto"