A simple PHP wrapper for the new JSON-based REST web service API of CollectiveAccess

Please visit http://www.collectiveaccess.org for more information and refer to http://docs.collectiveaccess.org for detailed information on the service API and other features of the core software.

To use this library, simply copy all the project files into a subdirectory of your project and include the class file of the service you want to use.

For example:

require './cawrapper/ItemService.php':
$client = new ItemService("http://localhost/","ca_objects","GET",1);
$result = $client->request();
print_r($result->getRawData());

This should get you a generic summary for the object record with object_id 1.

Here are some more simple examples for the other service endpoints to get you started:

$vo_client = new ModelService("http://localhost/","ca_entities");
$vo_client->setRequestBody(array("types" => array("corporate_body")));
$vo_result = $vo_client->request();

$vo_result->isOk() ? print_r($vo_result->getRawData()) : print_r($vo_result->getErrors());

$vo_client = new SearchService("http://localhost/","ca_objects","*");
$vo_client->setRequestBody(array(
	"bundles" => array(
		"ca_objects.access" => array("convertCodesToDisplayText" => true),
		"ca_objects.status" => array("convertCodesToDisplayText" => true),
		"ca_entities.preferred_labels.displayname" => array("returnAsArray" => true)
	)
));
$vo_result = $vo_client->request();

$vo_result->isOk() ? print_r($vo_result->getRawData()) : print_r($vo_result->getErrors());

To use authentication, you basically have 3 options. The first is to use the PHP constants __CA_SERVICE_API_USER__ and __CA_SERVICE_API_KEY__ as shown in the next example, This comes in handy if you want to run multiple service requests in the same script.

Note that all 3 authentication options try to retrieve an authToken from the remote service, save it in a temporary directory and re-use it as long as it's valid. When it expires, it re-authenticates using the username and key provided using one of the 3 options below. user/key are not used in the mean time.

Now back to option one - the constants:

require './ca-service-wrapper/ItemService.php';

define('__CA_SERVICE_API_USER__', 'administrator');
define('__CA_SERVICE_API_KEY__', 'dublincore');

$o_service = new ItemService('http://localhost', 'ca_objects', 'GET', 1);
$o_result = $o_service->request();

You can also use a simple setter:

require './ca-service-wrapper/ItemService.php';

$o_service = new ItemService('http://localhost', 'ca_objects', 'GET', 1);
$o_service->setCredentials('administrator', 'dublincore');
$o_result = $o_service->request();

The 3rd option (and probably most suitable for production) is to pass the credentials as environment variables CA_SERVICE_API_USER and CA_SERVICE_API_KEY. Imagine this simple script as authtest.php

require './ca-service-wrapper/ItemService.php';

$o_service = new ItemService('http://localhost', 'ca_objects', 'GET', 1);
$o_result = $o_service->request();

Then running something like this in a terminal should work:

export CA_SERVICE_API_USER=administrator
export CA_SERVICE_API_KEY=dublincore
php authtest.php

To do this in a web server setting, you could look into apache's mod_env.