The Platform as a REST Service

The DocuWare Platform is a REST service. This article explains how principles of REST are applied. In order to get an understanding of the Platform architecture you should read this article.

Resources and URLs

Most of the items of a DocuWare system are represented as resources by the Platform. This includes in particular

  • Documents, files, pages
  • Stamps, annotations
  • Users, organizations, file cabinets, dialogs
  • Search results

Each item is addressed by an URL. As a user you typically do not need to care about creating URLs for resources; it is enough to know the URL of the Platform service. From this entry point the URLs for related resources are either generated by the server or you have a pattern which describes how to generate an URL.

A resource can have several representations. Meta data, like documents or file cabinets, is typically represented as either XML or JSON, depending on the client. The .NET API requests meta data always as XML.

Each item can have links which lead to related resources. For instance

  • A file cabinet links to dialogs.
  • A search dialog provides a link which can be used to post a DialogExpression in order to get a DocumentsQueryResult.
  • A DocumentsQueryResult contains links to get the next result page or the first result page of the query. Each item of the search result represents a document. Because not all data of a document is embedded in the query result, each item contains a link named self which leads to the full representation of the document.
  • A document links to its sections. A section links to its pages. A page links to its graphical representations like thumbnails.

A client should follow the links. The .NET API provides easy-to-use functions, e.g. GetDocumentFromSelfRelation().