Posting Blog Entries to a Community

Question

Our tool is submitting blog entries to the idation blog for a configured community by using the Connections API.

Therefore, I use the following workflow, given only a community ID:

1) query /blogs/api/blogs?commUuid=<ID_HERE>&blogType=ideationblog
2) retrieve the link to the communities ideation blog from the xml result of aboves query. the xPath for this is "/app:service/app:workspace/app:collection[a:category[@term='entries']][1]/@href"
3) post the created blog entry payload to this url.

This all worked fine in our environment. However, when I deployed this at a customer, it did not work anymore. The url from the first step returns an empty xml document, and the following steps thus cannot be executed. I tried to query different urls on the customers server like /blogs/{homepageHandle}/api/blogs?commUuid=&blogType=ideationblog which work fine, however the query to the api service document above is the only one which contains the collection element with the link I need.

Is there any other API call I can do, to get this url? Do you know of any reason, why the call is working just fine in our environment, but fails at the customer? Might this be an access rights problem?

I am aware, that I could probably just create a url like "blogs//api/entries" and post to it, however I would prefer the above way, since I only have the communityUuid configured, and also because it is exactly the way that the API Documentation describes:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/appdevwiki.nsf/xpDocViewer.xsp?lookupName=IBM+Connections+4.5+API+Documentation#action=openDocument&res_title=Creating_blog_posts_ic45&content=pdcontent

ServiceDoc -> Collection -> href

UPDATE:

This might be a problem with the SBT really. My assumption, that an empty xml document was returned was wrong, it is rather that calls via the SBT Endpoint classes are returning null.

Endpoint endpoint = EndpointFactory.getEndpoint("connections");
Object result = endpoint.xhrGet("/blogs/api"); // also tried for /blogs/<homepage>/api

When I again tried those URLs in the Browser, I got the complete results. Problem with all this is, that I can neither reproduce this in our own environment nor am I able to debug this at the customer. I tried to catch possible exceptions from this, but none are thrown. It's just that the result is null.

To clarify: The same requests work perfectly fine in our own (Connections 4.0) environment, and also from the browser at the customer. I am of course using the same user to authenticate as well in the browser as in the API calls.

endpoint.isAuthenticationValid();

also returns true, so seemingly no problem there...

Answer 1

I have long ago given up trying to follow the IBM documented REST API instructions (not least of all because it always ends in a myriard of REST requests just to get to the URL I need to send my request to).

I tried both your URLs (/blogs/api/blogs?commUuid=... and /blogs/<homepage>/api/blogs...) against all our Connections 4.5 systems, but although I do get an xml document back it doesn't contain a reference to the ideationblog anywhere (and yes, I made sure to quest against a Community that does contain an ideation blog).

This is a dirty workaround, which you mentioned you did not want to do, but which I do use because the documented way doesn't work:

To post blog entries, you need to POST against

/blogs/<bloghandle>/api/entries

To find out the handle (<snx:handle>) of the ideation blog in your community, you can do the following:

1.) Get the widgets-feed for the community: /communities/service/atom/community/widgets?communityUuid=...
2.) Navigate to the entry of the Ideation Blog widget: <snx:widgetDefId>IdeationBlog</snx:widgetDefId>. 

Unless someone in your customer system has messed with the widgets-config.xml, the widgetDefId will be IdeationBlog.

3.) Take the <snx:widgetInstanceId> text of the Ideation Blog entry. 

That is the handle of your ideation blog. (Yes, community ideation blogs are created with the widgetInstanceId of the Ideation Blog widget as handle. Normal blogs are created with some mashup of their title as handle). You can now construct the URL to post the entries to.