Derivatives of RestService

The com.example.service.rest.SimpleSearchService class in asset-integration-starter project is a quick starter implementation for RESTful simple-search service. Its parent is com.hcl.unica.cms.integration.service.search.RestSearchService class.

The RestSearchService class has a type parameter RS, which represents the type of response (post deserialization) received from the remote REST API. In this case it is SimpleSearchResponse class defined inside the asset-integration-starter project.

RestSearchService class implements RestService interface and defines the SearchRequest class as the type argument RQ for RestService. Thus, the object of SearchRequest becomes input to all the simple-search services (same input is used for Functional counterpart of simple-search as well). SearchRequest class is part of the Asset Picker SDK.

In addition to defining the input type for the simple-search service, RestSearchService class also overrides the transformResponse method and defines return value of this method to be of ContentPage type. ContentPage is also part of the Asset Picker SDK and encapsulates the search result and associated pagination details.

The plugin must extend its simple-search implementation from RestSearchService service in order to be recognized as a simple-search service by Asset Picker.

RestSearchService extends from com.hcl.unica.cms.integration.service.search .AbstractSearchService abstract class.

We recommend looking at com.aem.service.AemSimpleSearchService class from the aem-integration project to know more about how the SearchRequest class and the ContentPage class are used during service implementation.

This is a common base class for RESTful as well as Functional simple-search implementations. So, the details of this class also apply to the Functional implementation of simple-search.

This class defines the com.hcl.unica.cms.integration.service.gateway.SimpleSearchServiceGateway interface as the service gateway for the simple-search service. ServiceGateways are the means to programmatically define input and output types of the service and the work with the service. A closer look at this interface tells us that the simple-search takes the SearchRequest object and returns the ContentPage object.

abstract public List<String> getSupportedContentTypes();

Implementation of this method returns a list of strings representing the categories of contents or assets to search against in target system. There is no specific semantic associated with the values in this list. It can be any meaningful text. It acts as a filter for client application during search operation. Client application can send values from this list to filter the search items. Values received from the client application can be obtained from the ExecutionContext object by navigating through the getRequest method and then calling getTypes() on it. getRequest() returns the SearchRequest object which contains the set of supported types the client application has sent to filter the search result. Simple-search implementation deals with these set of values as per the target system���s programming interface and filters the search items accordingly. Look at the getSupportedContentTypes method in com.aem.service.AemSimpleSearchService class in aem-integration project, and how the restrictContentTypes method in com.aem.service.simplesearch.SimpleSearchRequestBuilder class restricts the search result to the selected types.