Enabling CMIS Services in CRX

CMIS, or Content Management Interoperability Services, is a standard defining a unified data model and access methods to documents stored in multiple content repositories from different vendors. CMIS defines protocol bindings for two protocols, AtomPub and SOAP. The development of the standard is governed by the CMIS Technical Committee of the OASIS organization.

CRX provides a CMIS services module, which enables any CMIS client application or system to interoperate with CRX. The focus of CMIS on interoperability complements CRX content repository infrastructure based on JCR 2 standard, and further extends the standard interfaces to content managed within CRX, which include JCR with its local and remote access APIs, RESTful Web Services, WebDAV, and CIFS/SMB.

Read the dev.day.com blog on JCR - CMIS Comparison to learn more about both standards and how they relate to each other.

This guide will help you understand how to:

• enable CMIS services for CRX in your repository instance
• see the interoperability in action by using a CMIS client to connect to CRX
• get access to content managed in CRX from the CMIS client
  
• add content to CRX from the CMIS client

CMIS services module for CRX is available on Day Package Share. In order to enable CMIS services in your CRX, please follow the steps outlined below.

In the examples, we assume that you already have CRX running on the default port on the local machine (http://localhost:7402/). Otherwise, download CRX from www.day.com/crx and start the instance by double-clicking the CRX Quickstart distribution jar file.

Congratulations! Your CRX now exposes JCR content through CMIS services on

• http://<host>:<port>/cmis/repository

via CMIS AtomPub protocol.

Next, you can use a CMIS client supporting AtomPub to access the repository.

To see how content managed in CRX content repository is now open to integrate with CMIS-enabled applications and systems, you can do the following:

• Install or use a CMIS-enabled client application. There are many out there, just find one using your favorite search engine looking for a "cmis client"
• Configure it to connect to your CRX server via http://<host>:<port>/cmis/repository URL.
• Discover the CRX content

Despite the CMIS standard being still in inception, there are really a lot of various CMIS-enabled applications already. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that they would work with your CMIS server given that the standard is not finalized yet.

To illustrate the interoperability, we chose Shane Johnson's CMIS Explorer. It is a desktop application build on the Adobe AIR Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform, and the full source code is available.

CMIS Explorer requires Adobe AIR platform to be installed. Please download and install it if you don't have it already before proceeding.

Download and install the CMIS Explorer on your computer. Version 1.0 is also included in the CRX CMIS Server package, you can download it directly from CRX by using this link in the browser (assuming you are running the default installation):

• http://localhost:7402/libs/cmis/cmis-explorer-1.0.air

Once downloaded, install it by opening it on your desktop machine. It should get installed via Adobe AIR platform.

Log in to CRX's CMIS services endpoint by specifying the following connection parameters in the CMIS Explorer login window:

• Repository: http://localhost:7402/cmis/repository
• User: admin
• Pass: admin

Click Submit. The CMIS Explorer browser opens.

You can now check reported CMIS capabilities and mapped content types in the respective tabs.

Click the Browser tab to see CRX-managed content accessible to the CMIS client application. E.g., navigate to edit.esp file in CRXDE Lite (http://localhost:7402/crx/de/)

• /apps/firststeps/edit.esp

Then, browse for the same file in CMIS Explorer:

You can download the file to your desktop by clicking Download and selecting a folder on your disk.

CMIS interoperability with CRX repository also includes writing content to CRX via CMIS clients.

To try it out, upload a file from your desktop using CMIS Explorer. In a text editor create a new text file, e.g., uploaded-via-cmis.txt, enter some text and save it. Click Upload and select the file:

Now, check that the file is immediately available in the CRX repository.

Open CRXDE Lite and go to /apps/firststeps node. The just-uploaded file should appear as the last sub-node (you might need to refresh the view in CRXDE Lite to see it). Double click the new node to see its content in the editor pane:

Your content is now stored in and managed by the CRX enterprise content repository. You have turned it into an "open asset", which is available to other systems and applications via CRX standard interfaces and protocols:

• JCR: available to JCR-enabled applications, and all Java applications
  
• CMIS: available to CMIS-enabled applications
• REST and HTTP: available to Day CQ5 applications, or any other RESTful or HTTP-enabled applications; this basically makes your content available to Web 2.0, AJAX-based web applications
  
• WebDAV & CMIS: available to desktop users and filesystem-based applications

As an example, you can access the uploaded file as a REST resource by opening its URL and choosing desired representation (rendering) in your browser.

Default file content representation of the uploaded resource.

• http://localhost:7402/apps/firststeps/uploaded-via-cmis.txt
  

JSON representation of the JCR node of the uploaded resource:

• http://localhost:7402/apps/firststeps/uploaded-via-cmis.txt.json

JSON representation of the JCR node of the uploaded resource, and 1 level of sub-nodes:

• http://localhost:7402/apps/firststeps/uploaded-via-cmis.txt.1.json

In this guide, you have learned what CMIS is, how it relates to the JCR standard, and how to enable and use CMIS services in CRX. The CMIS services further extend CRX's open, standard based set of interfaces and interoperability protocols it supports.

Suggested next steps are:

• Visit dev.day.com developer's portal to learn more about CRX, CQ5, standards like JCR and CMIS, and content technologies
• Learn about other Day content integration products, Day JCR Connectors and Adapters, including JCR connectors for Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum, OpenText Livelink, generic Databases / JDBC data sources and other third-party repositories.
• Check www.day.com for the latest Day product news, events, webinars and screencasts, as well as product downloads
• Check docs.day.com documentation platform for the in-depth information about Day products