Integration support and plugin development approach

Unica Content Integration provides out-of-the-box support for easy integration with RESTful interfaces. It also facilitates alternative approach of plugin development to integrate with non-RESTful systems such as database, file systems, or any other content repository.

A typical plugin written for REST API integration does not contain any logic to establish connection with the target system, and to handle protocol level success and failure conditions. Such responsibilities are handled by the Content Integration Framework. Plugins provide only system-specific pieces of information, such as:
  • absolute location of the target API
  • HTTP method to be used
  • headers to be supplied
  • request body to be sent
  • type of the response to be expected
  • transformer for the received response

An alternate plugin development approach for non-RESTful integration involves thorough implementation. For example, a plugin written for fetching content from database needs to address everything involved in making DB connection, executing SQLs, closing connections, result set hydration, failure handling etc.

Plugins do not initiate the content search. Content Integration Framework first receives the search request, which is delegated to the respective plugin. In case of RESTful integrations, Content Integration Framework initiates the HTTP interaction and gathers the necessary information from the plugin, when required.