Portal 3.0 Data Interchange

Xinet is close to releasing the third iteration of their popular platform, Portal, and with this release comes every developers dream – an API.

Portal DI (Data Interchange), makes available all the core functions of Portal such as:

·      Listing files/folders within a directory/volume

·      Listing volumes

·      Read and Update metadata attributes for files

·      File manager operations such as upload, download, move, copy, etc.

·      Search

Xinet Portal 3.0 itself uses Portal DI to gather all the information it needs to build the site interface!

How does it work?

Portal DI is a REST-based API that serves JSON formatted data.  What this means is that you communicate with it using standard HTTP (GET or POST), and JSON formatted data is interpretable by nearly every language known to man at this point!  The simplicity of a REST-based API, coupled with the accurate & widely accepted JSON formatting makes this API truly a breeze to work with.

What can it do for me?

Portal DI essentially makes your DAM information modular.  Data about your assets can be accessed from anywhere and that data can be used in a variety of different ways.  As a developer who has been working with Portal for two years, I can’t explain how much easier integration with third-party platforms will be with Portal DI.

Can you show me an example?

Below is a very simple example of how to retrieve a list of volumes for a particular user (in this case 'demo').

As you can see, Portal DI is both simple and powerful.