RE: Enquiry

Hi Matthew,

And welcome to the list.


On Friday, October 17, 2014 11:45 PM, Matthew Slater wrote:
> I expect its not too difficult to build a db and expose lots of content
> types and fields with some kind of security wrapper. But at the moment
> all the data is defined and managed in Drupal.
> The Drupal Services module exposes content using Drupal's complex
> internal data structures which are not intuitive to external
> applications.
> So we need to define and publish and implement a rest API just for this
> data set. I was wondering if there was an easier way.

I'm not too familiar with the current state of Drupal but wouldn't it be possible to create a "View" and add a "REST export"? Alternatively, implementing a specialized serializer might work as well I guess.


> What I would ideally like is a standard way for 3rd party application
> to query my data structure, to find out what content types and fields
> are available, and from that information to generate its own content
> displays, its own content editing form, so that the data held on a
> central server can be managed by many apps, not just Drupal.

This goes a bit in the direction of decoupledcms.org Maybe you can leverage some of their work!?


> I don't want to have to change the code every time somebody changes the
> data structure.
> Seems such a generic requirement. Is it possible the code exists to
> this, server-side and even app side?

Btw. are you talking about the upcoming Drupal 8 or an older version? I think Drupal 8 provides much more than older versions in this regard and it is also much simpler to extend/tweak it as you need. Have a look at the Web Services and Context Core Initiative (WSCCI) [1] to get started.


HTH,
Markus


[1] https://groups.drupal.org/wscci


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Tuesday, 21 October 2014 09:09:13 UTC