Saturday, November 28, 2009

More PL/SQL Gateway Goodies

Hot on the heels of version 1.1, which was the topic of my previous blog post, the Thoth Gateway version 1.2 improves on the automatic SOAP Web Service feature, and adds a few new features as well!

Improved Automatic SOAP Web Services



Previously, every function had its own separate service endpoint. This was a bit of a pain, as you would have to (in Visual Studio-speak) add a separate web reference to each function. Now, all functions in a package are grouped together into a single service endpoint. Just add "?wsdl" to the package name, like this:



Upload files to file system instead of database table



Normally, files uploaded via a web page will be stored in the database table specified as "DocumentTableName" in the DAD configuration. In this version, there is a new configuration parameter, "DocumentFilePath", that will cause uploaded files to be saved to the file system instead.

XDB Integration



This version of the Thoth Gateway adds easy integration with Oracle XDB.




Upload files to XDB repository: You can specify a "DocumentXdbPath" in the DAD configuration file that causes uploaded files to be inserted as XDB resources in the specified folder. (This means there are now three different, and mutually exclusive, destinations for uploaded files: database table, file system, and XDB repository.)

Here, for example, we have just uploaded a zip file to XDB, which is then available via SQL, HTTP, FTP and WebDAV as usual:



Download files from XDB repository: You can specify an "XdbAlias" in the DAD configuration file. If this is specified, it will set up a virtual directory (similar to the "PathAlias" parameter) that forwards requests to the XDB repository. You can control which part of the repository you want to expose by specifying the "XdbPathRoot" parameter.

Here we are downloading the zip file via the gateway:



The new options are more fully explained in the installation guide.

Check out version 1.2 of the Thoth Gateway now!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks good, but cant work out how to connect to my XDB folders via FTP. Any help would be appreciated.

Morten Braten said...

@Anonymous: For troubleshooting XDB and FTP, see (for example) http://oraclequirks.blogspot.com/2007/12/on-oracle-xdb-repository-ftp-webdav-and.html

- Morten