What is Content Server Forms API used for?

HFCDev

The Content Server API has a forms API defined for so-called Alpacea forms. It looks like this API, just like the nodes API allows for the creation and update of Content Server objects. Some questions: 1) When would one use forms instead of nodes, 2) is there an API for accessing Content Server forms (i.e. WebForms), and 3) if there is no such API, is this something on the roadmap? For a client, I ended up building my own REST API to get details about Form templates, and recently added a form data fetch, update, and submit mechanisms. I may productize these if there is currently nothing on the roadmap about Content Server Web Forms.

-Hugh Ferguson

Matthew Barben

Hi Hugh,

I think it is more of a workflow thing. By providing the form elements for the various actions on a node (Create Node, Apply and Update Category, Move/ Copy Node) it means you can boilerplate an application reasonably quickly (and in the case of categories, if the definition changes the alpacha forms will roll with the changes).

As for an API to use forms, I would suspect you are fresh out of luck. In projects we have simply initially posted to forms via a WebReport - however WebReport parameters have a character limit of 2000 characters and when you are dealing with larger more complicated JSON objects that character limit can be reached pretty quickly so we ended up creating our own functions to post/update.

The challenges for updating a form directly a three fold

• formatting the LL_FormData parameter
• determining the LL_seq number for when you need to update the record
• and finally determining the attribute IDs to populate

Matthew Barben