[Building Sakai] Questions about developing a new websrvice for Sakai...

[Steve Swinsburg]

Hi Gregory,

You can set the content type of a response to whatever you want, you just
need to use the right methods. Have a look at getProfileImage in
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//profile2/trunk/tool/src/java/org/sakaiproject/profile2/tool/entityprovider/ProfileEntityProvider.java-
note it gets the binary and dumps it out in the ActionReturn object,
setting the content type along the way. You can also access the raw
response object if you want to do it that way.

For 2, whats the value you are getting? In keeping with REST you should
probably just throw a securityexception and the client using the web
service should handle it.

For 3, whats the error?

cheers,
Steve


On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Gregory Guthrie <guthrie at mum.edu> wrote:

> We are in process to create a new webservice for Sakai, which would allow
> one to access pre-defined report data automatically and remotely. The
> overall goal is to allow one to define the desired data using standard
> Sakai tools, but then have the data easily available externally and
> programmatically for further analysis, including integration of data from
> various Sakai report sources.
>
> That means that to get any report data, you can user this URL:
>          http://localhost:8080/report/siteID/reportName.format
> where format can be xml, csv, xls or json
>
> In doing this we found a few limitations, and want to check if these are a
> correct approach to the problem and understanding on how things work in the
> Sakai infrastructure, or if there are any better ways or suggestions.
>
> 1) We wanted to data to be available in xls and csv formats also since
> those are such simple formats to import (we setup some Excel reporting
> tools). However the current Rest API only supports to send xml and json
> formats to browser/client (Output formats). The REST API implementation in
> sakai is such that we can restrict the extensions they support, but we
> cannot add support to extra formats such as csv and xls format as well. And
> also there is no way to set the Content-Type header in implementation
> classes as well.
>
> That meant that we could not use the standard /direct/... API standard for
> our new webservice, which would seem like a better interface.
>
> 2) this led to a secondary problem, to provide authentication for these
> requests. From our developer:
> "In sakai platform all requests are going through the service "direct".
>  We created a new service, which is independent of direct service. If we
> use Sakai's REST implementation then it will come to our entity broker
> implementation through "direct" service, so there will be no extra coding
> for authentication.
> Even-though I used "sakai-login" tool to implement authentication and used
> the attribute "sakai.tool.helper.done.url" to set the original url path who
> invokes the login request, but after user gets authenticated, I am not
> getting the correct value for the attribute "sakai.tool.helper.done.url" .
> So I am not able to redirect the request to the original url which invokes
> this login operation."
>
> Because of this we would have to either allow unauthorized access to the
> data, or implement a separate authorization mechanism.
>
> 3) We also had a problem with an uncaught exception is site-stats;
> requiring us to modify
>   sitestats-components\WEB-INF\components.xml
>       (This is a temporary fixup for a JIRA problem, should go away when
> that is fixed.)
>         https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/STAT-350
>
> To remedy this we created a short-term fix by patching the components.xml
> file:
>                 <!-- Server Event Registry -->
>                 <property name="serverEventIds"
> ref="org.sakaiproject.sitestats.api.serverevents.List" />
>
>                 <!-- Sakai services -->
>                 ...
>                 <property name="checkLocalEventNamesFirst" value="true"/>
>         </bean>
>            <bean id="org.sakaiproject.sitestats.api.serverevents.List"
> class="java.util.ArrayList">
>                 <constructor-arg>
>                 <list>
>                         <value>site.add</value>
>                         <value>site.del</value>
>                         <value>user.add</value>
>                         <value>user.del</value>
>                         <value>user.login</value>
>                 </list>
>         </constructor-arg>
>         </bean>
>
> -------------------------------------------
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