Custom programming

Content Server follows open industry standards. It has a number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). You can connect to it from a Java Component, ASP page, or using a Web Service.

Let's see how we can use Web Services to integrate the Content Server into our enterprise. Currently, the most popular communications protocol for Web Services is Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). It uses a common web protocol, HTTP, to exchange XML-based self-describing messages between a server and a variety of clients.

To use SOAP Web Services, you'll need a WSDL Generator Component. (If you download Oracle Universal Content Management Document Management bundle, you can use Component Manager to install it.)

WSDL Generator includes samples on how to automate Content Server operations virtually from any programming language. Here's how a remote check-in might look:

First, we need to know the URL of our Content Server and user credentials (see screenshot below):

Then we specify metadata values and the file we're about to check in (as shown in the following screenshot):

Voila! The file was successfully checked in using a SOAP Web Service! (check out the following screenshot):

That's it. Were almost done with this section. There's just one more useful tip I want to give you here. It is related to Content Server configuration.