Within each main category, WMI information is further grouped into major functional areas. To view the WMI classes within a major functional area, simply click on its description. All the classes in that functional area will be displayed in a table. Then, to view WMI information for a specific WMI class, click on the class name.
A WMI class is a collection of information (called properties) about a specific piece of hardware, operating system entity, or application. Using this viewer, you can see all the information WMI collects for any class. For example, if you view the Win32_Printer class (one of the classes in the Hardware/Printing Classes group), you'll see information pertaining to the printers your machine knows about. For many classes, there may be more than one set or instance of information. If you have multiple printers defined, there will be an instance of the Win32_Printer class for each of them. The value of the Name property is shown at the top of the 2nd column of the table in which properties of a class are displayed; this will be a drop-down listbox when there are multiple instances of a class allowing you to choose which instance's data to view. (Please note: some WMI classes are likely to return a large number of instances. For example, the Win32_Directory class returns an instance for each directory present on the machine. The WMI Viewer limits the number of instances to 500. You can change this by modifying the value of MAX_INSTANCES in WMIViewer.html.)
As you can see, there are a large number of WMI classes available for collecting information about a machine's hardware and software. This viewer can be very useful for browsing through the many WMI classes to determine which classes and properties you want to use with the WMI collecting capabilities of Prism Asset Manager. An individual item is specified by taking the WMI class name and the property name, separated by a period. For example, to view the Status property of the Win32_DesktopMonitor class, you'd specify Win32_DesktopMonitor.Status as one of the items in the [WMI_REQUESTS] section of the exuser.ini file.
Please note: the WMI Viewer requires Internet Explorer version 5.0 or above. It will not operate correctly on other browsers.