Book Image

Alfresco 3 Web Services

Book Image

Alfresco 3 Web Services

Overview of this book

Alfresco 3 is the leading open source enterprise content management system that offers powerful features for interacting with the content in its repository from outside the system. These include the support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) implementation, reusable web scripts, and a Web Services API. This is the first book to show you how to use Web Services in Alfresco. Packed with examples, you'll learn how to build applications using Alfresco remote APIs based on SOAP and REST. You'll see how to use different APIs and bindings such as WebServices, WebScripts, and CMIS. Alfresco 3 Web Services starts off by showing you the services exposed by the Alfresco Web Services API, and how the API fits into the Alfresco software architecture.You learn to develop your application firstly by setting up and testing your Java development environment using the Alfresco SDK in Eclipse IDE and secondly by associating the Alfresco source code and Javadocs in Eclipse.With the help of real world practical examples, you learn how to do things like create, sort, and call Web Scripts, and invoke remote calls to Alfresco repository. To get the most from the Web Services API, you need to know about the basics of the Content Manipulation Language (CML), and the book takes you through this.Examples such as the bookshop application show you how to sign in, change user sessions, get, remove and change public and private associated contents, manage a cart for your e-commerce application, and so on.Next, by implementing a Microsoft .NET application using the Alfresco Web Services API, you see how to perform operations against the repository from your .NET application.The book provides you with REST and SOAP concepts, their comparison, basics of the FreeMarker language, Atom Publishing Protocol, JavaScript controllers, and the Apache Chemistry project.By the end of this book, you will be able to put together your knowledge about CMIS and the Apache Chemistry toolkit to develop a complete working application that uses Alfresco, via CMIS, as a back-end storage. Last but not the least, this book also covers the WebServices security profiles— the best practices for Web Services to promote better interoperability.

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Alfresco 3 Web Services
Aug, 2010 | 436 pages
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Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Alfresco 3 Web Services
Alfresco 3 Web Services
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introducing the SOAP Web Services API
Introducing the SOAP Web Services API
Web Services
Using Alfresco Web Services
Summary
2
Creating and Modifying Content
Creating and Modifying Content
The Content Manipulation Language (CML)
Authentication
Performing operations on nodes
Associations
Versioning
Aspects
Searching the repository
Summary
3
Collaboration and Administration
Collaboration and Administration
Creating collaborative content
Managing versioning explicitly
Managing locking explicitly
Classification and categories
Authorization
Managing rules
Managing users
Summary
4
A Complete Example
A Complete Example
Setting up the project
The Bookshop model
Adding a book to the cart
Cart page
Managing reviews page
Changing user details
Summary
5
Using the Alfresco Web Services from .NET
Using the Alfresco Web Services from .NET
Setting up the project
Searching the repository
Performing operations
Managing child associations
Summary
6
Introducing the Web Scripts Framework
Introducing the Web Scripts Framework
A lightweight alternative to SOAP Web Services
REST concepts
Your first Web Script
The Model-View-Controller pattern
URL matching
Authentication
Transactions
Requesting a specific format
Configuring Web Scripts
Cache control
Deployment
Summary
7
Templating with FreeMarker
Templating with FreeMarker
FreeMarker concepts
Variable interpolation
Directives
Comments
Using FreeMarker in Web Scripts
A simple example
Generating an Atom Categories Document
Summary
8
Writing a Web Script Controller in JavaScript and Java
Writing a Web Script Controller in JavaScript and Java
Providing a Web Script with a JavaScript controller
Root objects
General scripting techniques
Searching the repository
The ScriptNode API
A step-by-step example—posting reviews
Writing Web Scripts in Java
Summary
9
Putting it All Together
Putting it All Together
The Atom Publishing Protocol
Listing books by category
Creating a new book
Updating an existing book
Deleting a book
Summary
10
Overview of CMIS
Overview of CMIS
A bit of history
Objectives of CMIS
CMIS vs. JCR
The CMIS domain model
Services
Capabilities
Protocol bindings
CMIS in action
Summary
11
The CMIS AtomPub Binding
The CMIS AtomPub Binding
The CMIS AtomPub binding
Summary
12
Developing a CMIS Client using Apache Chemistry
Developing a CMIS Client using Apache Chemistry
Introducing Apache Chemistry
Downloading and installing Chemistry
The modules of the Chemistry client API
Setting up a connection
Code samples
Summary
13
The Web Services Binding
The Web Services Binding
Getting at the WSDLs
Some necessary pieces: WS-Security and WS-I Basic Profile
Browsing the repository
Inspecting objects
Acting upon objects
Summary
14
A Complete CMIS Client Application
A Complete CMIS Client Application
CMISWiki—a CMIS-based wiki
Building and running CMISWiki
The user interface
Implementation
Summary
The CMIS Query Language
The CMIS Query Language
The relational view projection
Results of queries
Grammar of queries
Escaping special characters

Performing operations

We can perform various operations on the repository. They are documented as follows:

Authentication

For each operation, you need to authenticate users before performing all the required operations on nodes. The class that provides the authentication feature is named AuthenticationUtils, and it allows you to invoke the same methods described in Chapter 2. This means that you will find startSession and endSession methods: 

String username = "johndoe";
String password = "secret";
AuthenticationUtils.startSession(username, password);
try{
}
finally {
AuthenticationUtils.endSession();
}

Remember that the startSession method requires the user credentials: the username as the first argument and the password as the second.

Notice that the default endpoint address of the Alfresco instance is as follows:

http://localhost:8080/alfresco.

If you need to change the endpoint address, you can use the WebServiceFactory class invoking the setEndpointAddress method to set the new location...

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