Spring Docs

This is a sample application for using database and storage services with the Spring Framework.

The application comprises of two services; spring-docs-ui, a UI service backed by spring-docs, a content service.

The content service is designed around the 3 central tenets of an Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS); content, content metadata and content search. A Spring Data Entity Document is both a target to we can associate content, and a model of the metadata for each piece of associated content. A Spring Data Repository provides a REST api for creating, reading, updating and deleting instances of Document. A Spring Content Store provides a REST api for creating, updating and deleting content, for associating it with an instance of Document and for searching "inside" the content. Lastly, a fragment is also applied to the Spring Data Repository that adds a REST api for performing pessimistic locking and versioning of instances of Document. A feature that is commonly found in ECMS.

For the meta-model, the content service can be configured to persist to a variety of different databases; either relational or document-based. For content, the content service can be configured to persist to a variety of different stores; file, object, BLOB or Mongo's GridFS. For search, the content service should be configured to run against Apache Solr. Profiles are used to configure these various services, as explained below.

Running the Content Service

The Content Service can be started locally using the following command:

~/spring-docs/spring-docs/$ mvn spring-boot:run [-Dspring.profiles.active=<database profile>, <storage profile> [, google-classification]]

Database Profiles

One of the following values:

• in-memory (no external database required)
• mysql
• postgres
• sqlserver
• mongodb

If no database profile is provided, in-memory will be used. If any other profile is provided, the appropriate database server must be started separately.

Configuring Database Connections

For mysql, postgres and sqlserver you can specify the environment variables; SPRINGDOCS_DS_URL, SPRINGDOCS_DS_USERNAME and SPRINGDOCS_DS_PASSWORD. SPRINGDOCS_DS_URL should be a correctly formatted jdbc connection string for the relevant database.

For mongodb you can specify SPRINGDOCS_MDB_URL with a correctly formatted jdbc connection string for the MongoDB database.

If connection variables are ommited the content service will attempt to connect to a "localhost" server and a database called springdocs.

If more than one of these database profiles are provided, the application will throw an exception and fail to start.

Storage Profiles

One of the following values:

• fs (no external storage required)
• blob
• s3
• gridfs

If no storage profile is provided, fs will be used. If any other profile is provided, the appropriate storage server must be started separately.

blob should be used in conjuction with mysql, postgres or sqlserver. See "Configuraing Database Connections".

For s3 you must specify the environment variables; AWS_REGION, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_KEY and AWS_BUCKET

gridfs is used in conjunction with mongodb. See "Configuring Database Connections".

If more than one of these storage profiles are provided, the application will throw an exception and fail to start.

Search Profiles

You can specify the environment variable SPRINGDOCS_SOLR_URL to specify the URL of your Apache Solr instance. If omitted the content service will attempt to connect to http://localhost:8983/solr/solr.

Classification Profiles

Document classification can be enabled by adding the google-classification to the set of active profiles. This will require the following:-

• google private key json file and GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable set with the path to this file
• application to be run with google-classification added to the set of active profiles

CORS

By default the application is configured to allow any client to connect. You can specify the environment variable SPRINGDOCS_ALLOW_HOST to specify the host to allow, restricting all others.

Running the UI Service

The user interface service can be started using the following command:

~/spring-docs/spring-docs-ui/$ mvn spring-boot:run 

Content Service Configuration

By default the UI service is configured to communicate with the content service hosted at http://localhost:9090/. If you want to run the services somewhere other than localhost then you can specify the environment variable SPRINGDOCS_CS_URL to specify your own URL.

The application will then be available to use at http://localhost:8080/index.html.