Working with REST Services

REST Services overview

REST Services provide a set of programmatic RESTful APIs that enable you to access and interface with data that is in IBM Content Manager repositories. You can list item types, and you can create, change, find and delete items, parts, and folders.

The functions that are necessary to build a web-based application with IBM Content Manager data are provided by the endpoints in REST Services. For example, you might want to get a copy of an insurance claim or change the address of a customer.

REST Services provide APIs that perform the following operations:

• authenticating to a IBM Content Manager repository
• listing item types
• creating, updating, querying, retrieving, moving, and deleting items
• checking items in and out
• adding items to a folder, removing them, and listing the items that are in a folder.

REST Services do not replace the client applications (for example, IBM Content Navigator) or the IBM Content Manager Java API.

REST Services implementation

REST Services are based on the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style; that is, communication between client and server is stateless and session state is kept entirely on the client. The endpoints provide a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) to find a IBM Content Manager resource, and then identify an action that is to be performed on it. REST Services use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as an exchange representation of resources and application state.

Example of using REST Services