Making an Update Service

Content Studio has an inbuilt mechanism for accessing a web service called an update service. You can configure an Escenic content type so that every time a specific field is modified, Content Studio sends the entire content item to such an update service. The update service can then modify the content item in some way and return it to Content Studio. This provides a simple mechanism for adding custom extensions to Content Studio. In order to extend Content Studio in this way, all you need to do is:

  • Create a web service that complies with the update service specification.

  • Add an element containing the URL of your service to a field definition in your publication's content-type resource.

Possible uses for an update service include:

  • Adding custom error checks to fields. Your service could, for example, use a national database to verify entered post codes.

  • Displaying or hiding one or more fields based on the value of another field. You might, for example, define a View field that determines which of the other fields are currently visible.

  • Adding useful information to content items. Your service could for example, perform a word count and return the result (not possible with the current version).

The advantage of using this mechanism to extend Content Studio is ease of deployment. You do not need to make any changes at all to Content Studio itself. You simply deploy a web service and configure any content types that you want to make use of the service.

Content Studio is currently only able to make limited use of the modified content item returned by an update service. Effectively, the only use case supported is that of error checking. Extensions to support other use cases are planned for future versions, however.