Details
-
Sub-task
-
Status: Resolved
-
Major
-
Resolution: Fixed
-
None
-
None
-
None
Description
LCF consists of a full-featured crawling engine and a full-featured user interface to access the features of that engine, but some applications are better served with a full API that lets the application control the crawling engine, including creation and editing of connections and creation, editing, and control of jobs. Put simply, everything that a user can accomplish via the LCF UI should be doable through an LCF API. All LCF objects should be queryable through the API.
A primary use case is Solr applications which currently use Aperture for crawling, but would prefer the full-featured capabilities of LCF as a crawling engine over Aperture.
I do not wish to over-specify the API in this initial description, but I think the LCF API should probably be a traditional REST API., with some of the API elements specified via the context path, some parameters via URL query parameters, and complex, detailed structures as JSON (or similar.). The precise details of the API are beyond the scope of this initial description and will be added incrementally once the high-level approach to the API becomes reasonably settled.
A job status and event reporting scheme is also needed in conjunction with the LCF API. That requirement has already been captured as CONNECTORS-41.
The intention for the API is to create, edit, access, and control all of the objects managed by LCF. The main focus is on repositories, jobs, and status, and less about document-specific crawling information, but there may be some benefit to querying crawling status for individual documents as well.
Nothing in this proposal should in any way limit or constrain the features that will be available in the LCF UI. The intent is that LCF should continue to have a full-featured UI, but in addition to a full-featured API.
Note: This issue is part of Phase 2 of the CONNECTORS-50 umbrella issue.