Sep 24, 2019
Connectivity and Web Services in Sitefinity
Sitefinity allows content to be shared with other applications via Web Services. That way content managed in the CMS can be exposed to external apps in a Headless scenario where those external apps have their own lifecycle, logic and meaning. Sitefinity creates an oData endpoint for the content that’s shared, and the other application communicates with it.
To create a Web Service, go to Administration and click on Web Services. Give your web service a Name and decide who can access it. When setting up authentication you have three options – Everyone, Authenticated Users or Administrators. If you don’t want to create a Public endpoint, choose the second or third option.
Next, we need to decide which content types we want to expose. Here we have full flexibility as all native and dynamic content types are supported by Sitefinity’s Web Services. We have the option to allow the system to automatically expose a new content type as a Web Service upon its creation. Finally, we activate the Service by selecting the This service is active checkbox.
Once created, we can browse the Web Service’s RESTful API by selecting the Use in your App hyperlink. Sitefinity creates the entire API reference, the needed parameters for authentication and the Response formats which the application will provide. That way the developers creating the external app will know what endpoints to use to get the needed data and what responses they can expect from Sitefinity in order to render that data properly.
Sitefinity allows content to be shared with other applications via Web Services. That way content managed in the CMS can be exposed to external apps in a Headless scenario where those external apps have their own lifecycle, logic and meaning. Sitefinity creates an oData endpoint for the content that’s shared, and the other application communicates with it.
To create a Web Service, go to Administration and click on Web Services. Give your web service a Name and decide who can access it. When setting up authentication you have three options – Everyone, Authenticated Users or Administrators. If you don’t want to create a Public endpoint, choose the second or third option.
Next, we need to decide which content types we want to expose. Here we have full flexibility as all native and dynamic content types are supported by Sitefinity’s Web Services. We have the option to allow the system to automatically expose a new content type as a Web Service upon its creation. Finally, we activate the Service by selecting the This service is active checkbox.
Once created, we can browse the Web Service’s RESTful API by selecting the Use in your App hyperlink. Sitefinity creates the entire API reference, the needed parameters for authentication and the Response formats which the application will provide. That way the developers creating the external app will know what endpoints to use to get the needed data and what responses they can expect from Sitefinity in order to render that data properly.