Thanks a lot for the info, and currently I am using the ONTAP 9.0 API.
The reason I need the index number is that, for a backup task I need to temporarily add a rule to the policy. And after the task is done, I want to remove the rule so that the policy will stay clean.
Now that because the index could be changed by someone else concurrently and there is no locking mechanism, I could end up removing a wrong rule at the end.
A concrete example:
At beginning of the task, I added rule foo with index 10.
At the end of the task, to be safe, I query again and find out that the rule foo is still at index 10, then I send out the API call to remove index 10.
However, at the same time before the API call arrives, another admin accidently add another rule bar with the same index 10, and rule foo will get a new index 11.
Finally, my API call will actually remove rule bar, which is wrong.
Actually, you can also reproduce this by concurrently having two admin UI connections.
It seems this cannot be solved given the current export rule behavior. Is my understanding right?
Thanks again,