Browse Livelink

Hi,

I am trying to integrate a 3rd party tool with Livelink and one of the requirements is to be able to browse the livelink folders (read-only) in this 3rd party tool. The tool itself is a web application.

A typical usecase would be :

The tool will have a page to allow users to add a livelink document. So a user will click on 'browse' button.

On click, it should open a view of the livelink server folders/documents. The user should be able to navigate to any subfolder(s) and select a file.

On selection, the selected document link should be available in the form field.

My questions are :

1) I am trying to use LAPI (java API) for the same. Is this the right approach ? Or is there any component available within livelink which would allow me to 'browse' directly.

2) Do I need to do the listobjects() at each level and send an AJAX call to the server and create the tree using JS/HTML ?

3) Are Livelink Browser/Search interface an embeddable into a third party web interface ?

From the questions, you would have figured out that I have a very limited knowledge about LAPI and Livelink in general.

Any pointers on where to start looking for a sample would greatly help.

Thanks,

Vikas

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Appu_Nair

!)there is nothing wrong in using Java livelink API,but if the livelink server is current like in LES9.7.1 then you have the ability to call java web services.

2)You would have to do that or in the new EWS scenarion OT ships an example model that gives you the tree.I don't know if you can repurpose it.

3)Livelink search is a html post/get forms based interface.It is much more efficient than trying to get search results thru the livelink API.

Let the forum know if you need code smaples/help etc.Personally I am old school so I tend to do LAPI or oscript and am not yet savvy with webservices.

Vikas_Jaitly

Appu,

Thanks for the quick response.The livelink is 9.7.0 version.

In point 2, do you mean to say that there is a ready to use html/JS code that can be hooked up in just any webpage and I get a tree browser.

Sorry, but could you tell what does EWS stand for ? And any documentation available in the KB for the same ?

Can we use the search APIs to do the same .. i.e. get the tree like structure. ..? And if I cannot use the tree model in 2 above, is the approach to use listobjects/search API to get the children and then render in a HTML tree type format the only one ...

Samples of 2 & 3 would definitely help..And yes, LAPI would be just fine ..

Thanks,

Vikas

Quoted Appu Nair (anair@alitek.com) on 2010/02/18 13:42:

!)there is nothing wrong in using Java livelink API,but if the livelink server is current like in LES9.7.1 then you have the ability to call java web services.

2)You would have to do that or in the new EWS scenarion OT ships an example model that gives you the tree.I don't know if you can repurpose it.

3)Livelink search is a html post/get forms based interface.It is much more efficient than trying to get search results thru the livelink API.

Let the forum know if you need code smaples/help etc.Personally I am old school so I tend to do LAPI or oscript and am not yet savvy with webservices.

Ferdinand Prantl

What you describe is pretty much the functionality of the CLM Services for SharePoint. It is a solution for archiving, records management and other scenarios where the customer wants to work with Livelink objects in the SharePoint web interface. (It can't be deployed on pure ASP.NET; it needs SharePoint, even if much of its functionality would be doable also with pure ASP.NET.)

There is a Livelink browsing web part there with pages uploading and downloading Livelink documents and pickers browsing the Livelnk workspaces, which covers your usage scenarios. There is also a Livelink search integration there based on the Livelink XML search API.

If your web application runs or can be run on SharePoint, I suggest you evaluate the CLM Service.There should be some presentations in the Knowledge Base and there is also an SDK on OTDN.

--- Ferda

Appu_Nair

Further to Ferda's and my replies here are some more interesting facts/clarifications

EWS or Enterprise Web services is another client api,just like LAPI but it can be called as a true web service.There should be a forum for that. and you can get samples form there.EWS will allow you to add documents,browse folders just like lapi does.Unfortunately the only livelink version that it will run is LES9.7.1 so you are out of luck on that.

I belive SP is based on LAPI SDK maybe they will change it sometime.

Do not get confused with ELS or Enterprise Library Services which addresses the broader OT offerings.It can be easily understood by the SAP RM implementation.SAP uses another livelink product called LEA and livelink has a good RM engine.So OT has made all their main products web service savvy so you can do a la carte stuff.

LAPI has a lot of programmers/examples interacting as it has been around for 10 yrs or more.EWS is just picking up steam.

This KB has a LAPI area and lots of starter examples

Self register on this site for a lot of examples

http://communities.opentext.com/communities/llisapi.dll/wiki/7967685/Best Practices - for Developers

This site has some code by me (very very old) maybe functional.

http://www.greggriffiths.org/livelink/development/lapi/

I have no idea how AJAX/JSON works.

Almost 6 yrs back LAPI was put on a webserver and OT used to call it Live Services.It had a Tree Control as well.It should work if you can find it.

Search XML API is very easy to do

Ferdinand Prantl

Yes, CLM Services use mainly LAPI to communicate with Livelink. We have supported LES 9.5 - 9.7.1 in various versions of the product and we expect to support the LES 10 with the same code base. If you begin coding from the scratch I you should consider the LES EWS.

(The first version LES EWS & ELWS did not satisfy our (CLMSP) requirements and we are going to evaluate the second version later. Also, the priorities for our development have been somewhere else for some time than in rewriting of the already working code...)

--- Ferda

Vikas_Jaitly

Appu/Ferda,

Thanks a lot for the inputs.. I figured out that, what I really need is the targetBrowse functionality.. This gives me a browsing functionality without writing much code in my client side ..

I am trying to use it now, with help from some of the older posts in the KB...

However I feel that it might not work because of the cross-site limitaitions when the child window is trying to update the values in the parent window.. This is due to the fact that the parent window, will be hosted from my 3rd party application, but the browser window is infact from the other domain (e.g. dev.livelink.com)

Any ideas on how to by-pass it ?

Thanks,

Vikas