Extending Digital Asset Management across the Enterprise

First generation Digital Asset Management products provided distinct applications to store, index and manage rich media assets. Many organizations now recognize that Digital Asset Management is part of the growing array of Enterprise Content Management services that are no longer restricted to a single application and need to be available across their entire information infrastructure.

With the latest Artesia DAM 6.8 release, Artesia now provides a Web Services programmatic interface for accessing functionality within Artesia using SOAP style web services via HTTP.

Simple, Interoperable Web Services

Search for assets	Retrieves assets that match the given criteria.
Retrieve asset metadata	Retrieves all metadata fields defined in the system.
Save asset metadata	Saves the given values in the metadata fields into all of the assets with the given ids.
Import assets	Submits and processes an import job.
Monitor Import job	Returns status information on a running or complete import job.
Export assets	Performs the export of the contents of the export list according to the attributes of the export request object.
Monitor Export job	Returns status information on a running or complete export job
Retrieve Transformer information:	Returns information on the requested asset transformer.

These services are built on top of a long tradition of providing programmable interfaces to customize and extend the Artesia DAM. These underlying Artesia APIs provide an interface to the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) upon which Artesia is built. Typically, the Artesia Java SDK has been used to build new client applications or new interfaces from scratch and to integrate Artesia DAM services into other applications. Such integrations include third party content related applications such as Web Content Management, Rights Management, Storage Management and Content Transformation applications but increasingly integrations into business systems such as ERP systems, product databases are becoming the norm.

Enabling Microsoft Windows applications

Because Artesia DAM is a JEE based application, a common use of these web services is for cross-platform DAM application development using .NET. This enables surfacing DAM assets within Windows based applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint.

Building .Net clients for the Artesia Web Services

The Artesia WSDL can be utilized by code generators such as the svcUtil.exe program provided in the Windows SDK to build client-side proxy code. This proxy code can then be used to make the web service calls.

More About the Artesia Web Services

The Artesia Web Services are not 'stateful' i.e. there is no concept of a 'login' session that remains active between web service method calls. Each web service method takes the Artesia user id as a parameter and generates a security session via login. This security session is valid only for the duration of the web service method and it will be logged out upon method completion.

The Artesia Web Services are built on a style of WSDL known as Document/literal wrapped and conform to the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1

Artesia's Web Services provide a programmatic interface for accessing functionality within Artesia using SOAP style web services via HTTP. Each web service method is built on the existing Artesia API which provides distinct advantages to developers. These include;

Efficiency - Artesia business objects are typically identified by an ID. This is a very efficient method of integration and the data to transfer is minimized and it avoids the need for a heavyweight business object to be retrieved. For example, it is possible to set metadata values without first retrieving the current metadata values.

Bulk processing - The majority of the Artesia methods support processing of more than one object at a time. For example, it is now possible to save metadata for multiple assets in a single call.

Transparent Business Objects - In general, business objects used and returned by the Services API are simple transfer objects. These objects are simple data objects with supporting methods and no or little business logic. This enables business objects to be more easily interrogated and constructed.

Asynchronous methods - The Import and Export based web services methods are asynchronous. They are designed to return immediately when called, and monitoring support is provided so that the status of the operation can be monitored real time.

Security - The Artesia web services can utilize WS-Security as the standard for securing the SOAP message between applications. By default WS-Security is disabled for the Artesia Web Services as one single security configuration would not suit all deployments.

In addition to above, the Artesia web services utilize JAXB for Java to XML binding from within Xfire. Since this is the case, the Artesia SDK classes can be used directly to build client programs that are intended to call Artesia web services. All of the mappings between Java and XML (and back) are known and automatically handled within the web services layer.

Fully Documented Examples

Along with the extensive Javadoc documentation for the JAVA API, Artesia provides extensive method documentation for the Artesia Web Services. Artesia also provide working examples of all the API and Web Services call together with the build and deployment configurations necessary.