I'm trying to create a XML data feed with dotCMS. I can easily output the correct XML document structure in a .dot "page", but the http headers sent to the client are still saying that my page contains "text/html". How can I change them to "text/xml" or "application/xml"?
Apparently there's no way to do it using the administration console. The only way I found is to add this line of (velocity) code
$response.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/xml")
to the top of the page template.
Your solution is the easiest. However there are other options that are a bit more work, but that would prevent you from having to use velocity to do the XML generation, which is more robust most of the time.
DotCMS uses xstream to generate XML files (and vise versa). You could write a generic plugin to use this as well.
An JSONContentServlet exists in dotCMS that takes a query and generates json or xml (depending on your parameters). It is not mapped on a servlet by default, but that is easy to add.
Related
What's the most appropriate way in REST to export something as PDF or other document type?
The next example explains my problem:
I have a resource called Banana.
I created all the canonical CRUD rest endpoint for that resource (i.e. GET /bananas; GET /bananas/{id}; POST /bananas/{id}; ...)
Now I need to create an endpoint which downloads a file (PDF, CSV, ..) which contains the representation of all the bananas.
First thing that came to my mind is GET /bananas/export, but in pure rest using verbs in url should not be allowed. Using a more appropriate httpMethod might be cool, something like EXPORT /bananas, but unfortunately this is not (yet?) possible.
Finally I thought about using the Accept header on the same GET /bananas endpoint, which based on the different media type (application/json, application/pdf, ..) returns the corresponding representation of the data (json, pdf, ..), but I'm not sure if I am misusing the Accept header in this way.
Any ideas?
in pure rest using verbs in url should not be allowed.
REST doesn't care what spelling conventions you use in your resource identifiers.
Example: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/post
Even though "post" is a verb (and worse, an HTTP method token!) that URI works just like every other resource identifier on the web.
The more interesting question, from a REST perspective, is whether the identifier should be the same that is used in some other context, or different.
REST cares a lot about caching (that's important to making the web "web scale"). In HTTP, caching is primarily about re-using prior responses.
The basic (but incomplete) idea being that we may be able to re-use a response that shares the same target URI.
HTTP also has built into it a general purpose mechanism for invalidating stored responses that is also focused on the target URI.
So here's one part of the riddle you need to think about: when someone sends a POST request to /bananas, should caches throw away the prior responses with the PDF representations?
If the answer is "no", then you need a different target URI. That can be anything that makes sense to you. /pdfs/bananas for example. (How many common path segments are used in the identifiers depends on how much convenience you will realize from relative references and dot segments.)
If the answer is "yes", then you may want to lean into using content negotiation.
In some cases, the answer might be "both" -- which is to say, to have multiple resources (each with its own identifier) that return the same representations.
That's a normal thing to do; we even have a mechanism for describing which resource is "preferred" (see RFC 6596).
REST does not care about this, but the HTTP standard does. Using the accept header for the expected MIME type is the standard way of doing this, so you did the right thing. No need to move it to a separate endpoint if the data is the same just the format is different.
Media types are the best way to represent this, but there is a practical aspect of this in that people will browse a rest API using root nouns... I'd put some record-count limits on it, maybe GET /bananas/export/100 to get the first 100, and GET /bananas/export/all if they really want all of them.
I need to invoke a remote REST interface handler and submit it a file in request body. Please note that I don't control the server. I cannot change the request to be multipart, the client has to work in accordance to external specification.
So far I managed to make it work like this (omitting headers etc. for brevity):
byte[] data = readFileCompletely ();
client.target (url).request ().post (Entity.entity (data, "file/mimetype"));
This works, but will fail with huge files that don't fit into memory. And since I have no restriction on filesize, this is a concern.
Question: is it somehow possible to use streams or something similar to avoid reading the whole file into memory?
If possible, I'd prefer to avoid implementation-specific extensions. If not, a solution that works with RESTEasy (on Wildfly) is also acceptable.
ReastEasy as well as Jersey support InputStream out of the box so simply use Entity.entity(inputStream, "application/octet-stream"); or whatever Content-Type header you want to set.
You can go low-level and construct the HTTP request using a library such as the plain java.net.URLConnection.
I have not tried it myself but there is example code which reads a local file and writes it to the request stream without loading it into a byte array.
Upload files from Java client to a HTTP server
Of course this solution requires more manual coding but it should work (unless java.net.URLConnection loads the whole file into memory)
I need to create an endpoint which return some form of a report. Something like:
api-v1/report?format=XML. And it report with custom XML-report.
What should I do in case xsl?
api-v1/report?format=XSL is it normal to answer on such request with XSL(Excel) file?
the resource (data) should be independent from the formatting/encoding
whether it is xml, json, xls, csv, etc should be determined through "content negotiation" usually accomplished by using the "accept" header.
One solution is to respond with the URL of where the file can be downloaded from, instead of sending the contents of the file.
We had a problem with some of our IE clients failing to download a PDF, even after clicking on the link. We found the answer here resolved our problems: set forcedownload=true for PDF mime types in web.config.
However, that created another problem: we are now unable to render a PDF in a browser when we want to. We used to do this with an iframe. However, as you can see, the PDF just downloads, and does not render in the browser.
I learned that the forcedownload=true setting is actually a default in a subsequent version of Sitecore (v7.2). So, I'm hesitant to revert that.
So, how do I render a PDF in a browser in this situation?
You can leave forceDownload=false on the PDF mime type and instead set the following setting to false:
<setting name="Media.EnableRangeRetrievalRequest" value="false"/>
I faced the same dilema a few months back with the same initial fix. Found out the actual issue last week, I wrote a blog post about it. (In fact, I wrote the answer you linked to, I've updated it with the same information now for future visitors)
The issue is basically a combination of Adobe Reader plugin for IE9, chunked transfer encoding and streaming the file directly from the database. I found if you close your browser and try again, or force refresh with Ctrl+F5 it worked fine. Once Sitecore had cached the file to disk it would continue to work for everyone.
The above setting disables chunked transfer encoding, instead sending the file down to the browser as a single piece. This setting was introduced in Sitecore 6.5+
This is one of the flaws in the MediaRequestHandler and in my opinion; the forceDownload option is pretty useless the way it is designed by default. (Why would ever want to configure this option on media extension only?)
You’ll have to basically turn off the forcedownload option again and replace the MediaRequestHandler with your own one. I usually end up with writing my own anyway because if other issues with the default handler, such as dealing properly with CDN’s etc.
In the ProcessRequest pipeline, you can determine if the item should be “downloaded” or not by setting the Content-Disposition header. You basically need to get rid of the default handling of forceDownload and set your headers based on your own logic.
Personally I prefer to set a query string parameter, such as ?dl=1, and base the Content-Disposition header on this. You could also extend the MediaItem template to contain a default behavior on each item or sub tree (leverage from Sitecore inheritance and standard values), and potentially you could thereby also define (override) a specific filename on each item for the attachment part in the Content-Disposition header.
When rendering the link, you can leverage from the properties collection (write a suitable extension method or similar), so that you can clearly mark your code that the link is meant for download, but still leverage from the built in field render methods. Thereby you eliminate the risk of messing up the page editor etc.
/ Mikael
You have to disable range retrieval request in web.config by setting its value to false.
<setting name="Media.EnableRangeRetrievalRequest" value="false" />
MediaRequestHandler enables Sitecore to download PDF content partially in range using HTTP 206 Status code. You can also overwrite MediaRequestHandler and write your own custom implementation to handle media request.
I don't know that I have the terminology completely correct, but it seems that there are some default behaviors for script resolution in Sling (which I'm using as part of Day CQ). For example, .infinity.json returns a representation of the node and its children. Also, if I have a piece of content that I normally would access with a .html extension, I've been able to use a .xml or .json extension to get a representation of that data. However, if I use a .txt extension, I get nothing back, even though as far as I can tell, I do have scripts that should match the request (eg GET.jsp). Are these behaviors documented somewhere?
GET.jsp will match a request ending with .html, as Sling considers html as the default representation. To activate a JSP script for the .txt rendering, you need to name it txt.jsp
See http://sling.apache.org/site/servlets.html for details.