Administering Atom feeds
To create an editable collection from an existing Atom feed, set up new URIMAP and ATOMSERVICE resource definitions and a new Atom configuration file. Your new definitions use most of the settings from the original Atom feed with some small changes.
Before you begin
About this task
A client can use a collection in the same way as an ordinary Atom feed, by obtaining lists of the Atom entries and displaying them. It would therefore be possible for you to change the ATOMSERVICE definition and configuration file for your Atom feed to meet the requirements for a collection, and let CICS deliver the collection to all users in place of the original Atom feed. However, good practice is to create separate CICS resource definitions and use separate URLs to make your Atom entries available as a collection, and continue to make them available separately as a feed. Setting up the same data as a feed and as a collection does involve additional work, but has some important advantages:
- You can apply appropriate security measures to the editable collection, and make the read-only feed freely available.
- You might achieve better response times by delivering the better-performing feed document to most users. Delivering entries from a collection requires more processing than delivering entries from a feed, because of the extra navigation that CICS provides for a collection.
To create an editable collection from an Atom feed:
Procedure
- Plan appropriate security measures for your collection,
so that you allow only authenticated web clients to edit the entries
in the collection. For more information about security, see Security for Atom feeds.
- Set up a TCPIPSERVICE resource definition to specify the
security measures that are applied for the port where web clients
make requests for your collection. Creating TCPIPSERVICE resource definitions for CICS web support explains how to do this.
- Select a suitable URL for your collection that is different
from the URL that you used for the Atom feed, and create a new URIMAP
resource for the URL of the collection. As well as being different from the URL for the Atom feed, the URL that you choose must also be different from the URL for other Atom feeds and collections that you serve using the same host name.
- Complete the steps in Creating an ATOMSERVICE definition and Atom configuration file for a collection to set up a new ATOMSERVICE
definition and Atom configuration file based on your existing files
for the Atom feed. If you are using resource and command security to protect your collection, make sure that the user IDs of web clients have access to the ATOMSERVICE definition and the resources that it references, including any CICS resources and commands used by a service routine.
- Create an Atom service document that includes the collection,
following the instructions in Creating an Atom service document.
You can also create an Atom category document to specify categories for your collection, following the instructions in Creating an Atom category document.
- Set up CICS resource definitions to deliver your Atom service and category documents, following the instructions in Delivering an Atom service or category document as an Atom configuration file or Delivering an Atom service or category document as a static response .