Content Engine Web Service Overview

The Content Engine Web Service (CEWS) is an industry standards-conformant SOAP interface to the IBM® FileNet® P8 Content Engine. It allows applications to access most of the functionality available through the Content Engine Java and .NET APIs.

CEWS provides general-purpose SOAP operations (methods) and elements that expose all of the Content Engine objects and most of their properties and methods. Its methods have been designed with performance and scalability in mind, by virtue of:

CEWS complies with the following web services specifications:

For an introduction to web services, see the following web site: Understanding Web Services.

WSDL and Namespace Support

CEWS uses the following Web Services Description Language (WSDL) format XML files:

Port/binding pairs are defined in CEWS according to the supported mechanisms for content transfer and are bound to the following endpoint URLs through which the associated WSDL can be accessed at runtime. The Content Engine server determines the content transfer method based on the endpoint used:

The elements and types defined in the CEWS schema are assigned to the following namespaces:

Object Identifiers

The WithObjectIdentityType element provides the basis for identifying Content Engine objects, in which information describing an object (its class ID, object ID, and object store) are returned.

The Content Engine has two primary object types: independent and dependent:

Duplicate Object Suppression

During object retrieval of objects that have object-valued properties, it is possible to reach the same object more than once if a property filter forces a recursion. (For example, retrieving a folder and forcing deep recursion through the Parent and SubFolders properties.) This can lead to runaway recursion and excessive memory usage on the server. To prevent this, the server uses a mechanism to suppress recursion into duplicate objects. This duplicate object suppression mechanism overrides the true recursion level and operates as if the maximum recursion level has already been reached for the duplicate object, therefore terminating recursion at a duplicate object. When a duplicate object is detected, an object reference (represented by an ObjectReference element) is placed into the response instead of an object value (represented by an ObjectValue element). Duplicate object suppression has the following effects on returned objects:

The scope of duplicate object detection encompasses each individual top-level component of a response (for example, an individual ObjectResponseType within a GetObjects response). Therefore, if an object appears beneath one top-level response element, and also appears beneath a different top-level response element, the second occurrence of the object is not treated as a duplicate.

Occasionally, an object value is returned for an object that occurs at a high recursion level while other copies of the same object occurring at a lower recursion level are suppressed. Because fewer properties will typically be returned for objects at higher recursion levels, the client might have a copy of the object that has a much smaller subset of properties than was desired. This can result in either additional network round trips to retrieve the missing properties, or errors if the client application does not realize that it is missing properties. When an object reference is returned instead of an object value, it might not be clear to the client application whether this is because of a normal property filter evaluation or duplicate object suppression.

Accessing Multiple Object Stores

A Content Engine object store server can provide access to multiple object stores, and multiple object store servers can provide access to each object store. Each object store server can host a single CEWS server, which can access any object store server in the P8 domain. CEWS clients can access any of the object stores through either of the object store servers. The following diagram shows a configuration with two object store servers and three object stores: