Revision [20023]
This is an old revision of RESTHandlerInfo made by DomBonj on 2008-06-08 17:10:46.
REST Handler Documentation
Not Included in official Wikka versionSee also:
Development: RESTHandlerDocumentation
Short description
Turn your wiki into a web service provider, by extracting selected bits of a page and serving them as XML data.Parameters
Parameters are passed in the URL suffix, formatted as rest/tag/attribute/value/rank, where:name | type | required? | default | description |
---|---|---|---|---|
tag | string | optional | The name of an XHTML tag (e.g. 'p', 'div', etc.) | |
attribute | string | optional | The name of an XHTML attribute (e.g. 'class', 'id', etc.) | |
value | string | optional | The value of the XHTML attribute. If present, attribute has to be present too (see examples below) | |
rank | integer | optional | The sequence number of the targeted tag in the page |
All parameters can be omitted but the '/' separator has to be present it there are subsequent parameters (see examples below.)
Long description
All wikkawiki pages are structured documents, the structure being provided by XHTML tags. With the REST handler, specified chunks of a page can be extracted and provided as XML data. This helps turning any wiki into a web service provider and enables other applications or data consumers to access and process portions of a page.This handler is a partial implementation (offering only a read-only mode, i.e. only the 'GET' method is supported) of the REST style of implementing web services.
All wiki page elements (paragraphs, images, hyperlinks, etc.) are called "resources" in REST parlance. The resource(s) to be selected by the handler are specified by the parameters passed in the URL (see previous paragraph and the examples below.) Note that only resources located inside the page content itself, but not the header and footer, are accessible (in technical terms, inside the '<div class="page">')
The output of this handler is a text file containing valid XHMTL, with an XML preamble and the HTTP 'Content-Type' set to text/xml. It is thus valid XML data and can be processed by any XML parser. Note that the output of this handler can be viewed inside a web browser (e.g. for debugging purposes), but that most of the time it is expected to be consumed by a program, not viewed directly.
Usage
http://www.wikkawiki.org/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage/rest/div///2
Examples
tag | attribute | value | rank | URL suffix | Comments |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
p | /p | Selects all the paragraphs (<p> tag) in the page | |||
p | class | /p/class | Selects all the paragraphs in the page having a 'class' attribute, whatever its value. This will select <p class='title'> but not <p id='examples'> | ||
p | class | code | /p/class/code | Selects all the paragraphs in the page having a 'class' attribute equal to 'code' | |
p | class | code | 3 | /p/class/code/3 | Selects the third paragraph in the page which has a 'class' attribute equal to 'code' |
p | 3 | /p///3 | Selects the third paragraph in the page, whatever its attributes | ||
3 | ///3 | Selects the third tag in the page, whatever its type and attributes | |||
p | code | /p//code | Not allowed | ||
code | ///code | Not allowed |
To-do, bugs and limitations
- Main limitation: this handler will only work on a web server supporting PHP5.
- Limitation: when using mod_rewrite, empty parameters are rewritten into mistaken URLs (example: mysite/mypage/rest/div///3 becomes mysite/mypage/rest/div/3.)
- At this time, character encoding is UTF-8. This may be viewed by some as a limitation.
Author
DomBonjCategoryDocumentation