Contents

Integration with the backend

Integration with the backend

Plone backend integration

Integration with the Plone CMS is provided by the Plone API framework, namely plone.restapi and its lower-level plone.rest. For details please check the plone.restapi documentation website.

Some of the more interesting integration features that you can look up in the plone.restapi documentation:

  • Endpoints: the equivalent of Plone "views", these are REST Api endpoints that you can call from the frontend. The response should be in JSON format. You'll use these for any type of interaction with the backend.

  • Content expansions: additional information that can be added to the main response. For example, when fetching "content" information, you may want to also include information about the author, so you could write an expand that automatically inserts that information if the ?expand=author is present in the request. It is also possible to create expand elements that will automatically insert their content in the response, without the need for the request parameter.

  • Block transformers: these are named subscribers that can be used to automatically change the information that is sent to the frontend for some of the blocks, but they can also do the opposite, to process the information coming from the frontend (on create or update operations) and change the way the block value is stored in the database. There are multiple use cases for this type of feature, for example to automatically convert incoming links in block values to resolveuid-based links (and to convert them back to absolute URLs when retrieving the block value from the frontend).

  • Search and indexing integration: by providing the right adapters, you can extract searchable text from blocks.

Note

This section contains pointers for backend integration with Plone. Contributions for the Guillotina backend are needed.

previous

Best practices for addons

next

Deploying