GNM_RCS_PicDar_Interface_TS

• 1. .Introduction

     1. Purpose

The document GNM_RCS_System_Interfaces_FS.docx is the functional specification that describes what business functions RCS supports in relation to its interfaces with other GNM systems as well as any external integration.

This document is one of a set of technical specifications that provide details of how those functions are implemented in RCS.

• 1. Scope

This document focusses on the PicDar interface, whereby details of a picture held in the PicDar library can be displayed to a user if insufficient information is available. Separate documents deal with all other inter-system interfaces that pass data between RCS/SLM and other systems.

This document is intended as a high-level technical document outlining how the relevant business functions are implemented in terms of software modules.

Importantly, this document does not aim to provide the level of detail that would be required in a programming specification in areas such as program structure, detailed business rules, data integrity, validation, locking considerations, data security, and calls to/from other software modules, performance considerations, and so forth.

For details of program logic and coding, the reader should refer to the program files themselves.

• 1. .PicDar interface

     1. Background

RCS receives data about published images from the website feeds and from the archive of print content. Often this information is incomplete, or insufficient to identify the party that supplied the image, or to identify whether this is a reuse of a picture published elsewhere.

• 1. Business requirement

There is a requirement to be able to get more information about pictures from various sources, including online via PicDar, in the background via Octopus, or by opening up the actual content.

Many of the images published by GNM are archived in the PicDar libraries and so this is a good upstream source of original data. This document deals with this source of information.

• 1. Interface solution

The PicDar interface is an http call from various content-related screens in RCS to the following URL:

http://octweb/octopus/getpicdarinfo.jsp?picdarRef=

Appended to this URL is the PicDar URN being queried i.e. the unique identifier of the image. The URN usually starts with 2 letters, followed by a *, and then a number e.g. PD*2345678

The above URL is defined as a configuration parameter so that it can be modified when necessary by the RCS administrator. The current value of the parameter is available from the database function cpar.picdar_service_value

• 1. Example

In the RCS screen shot below a picture record is highlighted for which PicDar information is available. The PicDar field in the bottom right shows the value GD*40141252, and the “PicDar” button in the button-bar at the bottom of the screen is highlighted, and so can be pressed.

Pressing the “PicDar” button causes a new tab or new window to be launched – displaying the generated URL:

http://octweb/octopus/getpicdarinfo.jsp?picdarRef=GD*40141252

The information displayed from PicDar in this example is:

• 1. Validating PicDar URNs

In various places in RCS it is useful to be able to validate whether the data in the PicDar field is valid or not. A database package called picdar and has two functions: the first urn_valid determines whether the value passed in is a valid format to be a genuine URN, returning TRUE or FALSE; the second urn_is_valid_filename determines whether the value passed in is a valid filename, again returning a Boolean value.

End of Document