Working with Publish Events in WebCenter Sites – Part 1

Sometimes it’s useful to perform an action in response to a WebCenter Sites publishing event. Good use cases include archiving and audit.

This tutorial, which is the first of a two-parter, will help you to understand what’s available to you as a developer for listening and responding to Publish Events.

Getting Started

To start with you’ll need the following installed:

• Two local instances of WCS
• Eclipse
• Maven

The two instances of WebCenter Sites should be running on different ports. They should have some content in them (avisports for example) and the first should be set up so that the delivery destination is set to the host and port of the second. You’ll also need a copy of eclipse which is capable of running a Maven build.

An Introduction to PublishEvents

In essence publish events are fairly simple to work with.

Firstly we have an interface that we need to implement to create an Event Listener.

PublishEventListener requires we implement one method called onEvent. This method receives an object that conforms the interface PublishingEvent.

PublishingEvent has the following methods described:

• getPubSessionId() – this helps us to identify which publish the event refers to
• getMessage() – returns a message describing the event
• getStatus() – returns one of the predefined publish status as described in the enum PublishingStatusEnum
• getTaskName() – returns one the predefined publish tasks as described in the enum RealTimeConstants.PublishingTasks

Publishing Tasks

The tasks in RealTimeConstants.PublishingTasks map broadly to the standard phases of RealTime publishing and can be described as follow

Publish Tasks Status

The statuses in in the PublishStatusEnum can be described as follows

Creating a project

With all of that in mind lets get a simple project setup with a sample PublishEventListener that allows us to view all the events that are fired during a RealTime publish. At this point you can either clone the sample project from our GitHub repo or you can follow along and build it from scratch.

To start with we need to create a simple maven project with a POM similar to this

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

  <groupId>uk.co.manifesto.wcs</groupId>
  <artifactId>publish-events</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>jar</packaging>

  <name>publish-events-part1</name>
  <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>

  <properties>
    <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
  </properties>

  <dependencies>
    <!--  sites -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.fatwire.cs</groupId>
        <artifactId>xcelerate</artifactId>
        <version>11.1.1.8.0</version>   
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.fatwire.cs</groupId>
        <artifactId>cs-core</artifactId>
        <version>11.1.1.8.0</version>   
    </dependency>
    <!-- logging -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
        <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
        <version>1.1.1</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>           
    <!-- test -->
    <dependency>
      <groupId>junit</groupId>
      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
      <version>4.10</version>
      <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.0.2</version>
            <configuration>
                <source>1.6</source>
                <target>1.6</target>
            </configuration>
        </plugin> 
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

We only need two WebCenter Sites jars to build our PublishEventListener class and you can add them to your local maven repository by running these maven commands from within the WEB-INF/lib directory of the cs web application:

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=xcelerate.jar -DgroupId=com.fatwire.cs -DartifactId=xcelerate -Dversion=11.1.1.8.0 -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -Dfile=cs-core.jar -DgroupId=com.fatwire.cs -DartifactId=cs-core -Dversion=11.1.1.8.0 -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true

Then we’re going to create a simple class that implements the PublishEventListener interface. My sample class isn’t very complicated at all – it simply listens to all the publish events and dumps information about them to the sites.log

package uk.co.manifesto.wcs.publishevents;

import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;

import com.fatwire.cs.core.event.EventException;
import com.fatwire.realtime.event.PublishingEvent;
import com.fatwire.realtime.event.PublishingEventListener;

public class PublishListener implements PublishingEventListener {

    private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(ExportListener.class);

    public void onEvent( PublishingEvent event ) throws EventException {
        log.info(String.format("Publish task: %s",event.getTaskName()));
        log.info(String.format("Publish status: %s",event.getStatus()));
        log.info(String.format("Publish message: %s",event.getMessage()));
    }

}

Now we need to compile our project and deploy register the listener.

Running mvn clean package will produce us a jar file that we can then deploy to the lib directory of the cs webapp.

Finally we need to register our listener. You can use the exported table in the eclipse project if you want and import that with catalogmover or you can create an entry in the table FW_PublishingEventRegistry with the following data:

id: <LetWCSAutoGenerate>
location: uk.co.manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener (or whatever the fully qualified name of your class is)  
blocking: Y

The blocking parameter determines whether your listener runs in the same thread as the publish itself.

Once the listener is registered we need to test it. Let’s do this by running a publish from system one.

Find an asset an approve it for publish to the delivery destination. The go to the admin tab, select Publishing from the menu and then select the Delivery destination. You should see at least one asset ready to publish.

Click the publish button and wait for the publish to finish. You will be able to test whether it was successful by looking at the history tab.

If everything went well you should have a look at the sites log ${sitesInstallDir}/logs/sites.log where you’ll see some output similar to this:

[2013-11-07 17:25:15,425 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: SESSION
[2013-11-07 17:25:15,425 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: STARTED
[2013-11-07 17:25:15,425 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: publishing started for pubsession 1374098078090
[2013-11-07 17:25:15,427 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [logging.cs.xcelerate.publish] Starting RealTime publish session 1374098078090
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,701 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: GATHERER
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,701 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: STARTED
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,701 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: Gatherer started for pubsession 1374098078090 with gatherer: com.fatwire.realtime.DataGathererImpl
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,835 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: GATHERER
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,835 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: SUBTASK_FINISHED
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,835 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: Gatherer finished for pubsession 1374098078090 with gatherer: com.fatwire.realtime.DataGathererImpl
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,845 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: PACKAGER
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,845 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: STARTED
[2013-11-07 17:25:16,845 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: Start Packaging
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,030 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: PACKAGER
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,030 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: SUBTASK_FINISHED
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,030 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: All the resources have been packaged
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,083 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: TRANSPORTER
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,083 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: STARTED
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,083 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: Transportating started for pubsession 1374098078090 with Transporter: com.fatwire.realtime.MirrorBasedTransporterImpl
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,885 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: TRANSPORTER
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,886 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: SUBTASK_FINISHED
[2013-11-07 17:25:18,886 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: Transportating finished for pubsession 1374098078090 with Transporter: com.fatwire.realtime.MirrorBasedTransporterImpl
[2013-11-07 17:25:34,271 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [logging.cs.xcelerate.publish] Completed RealTime publish session 1374098078090
[2013-11-07 17:25:34,276 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish task: SESSION
[2013-11-07 17:25:34,276 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish status: DONE
[2013-11-07 17:25:34,276 UTC] [INFO ] [http-bio-9080-exec-1] [manifesto.wcs.publishevents.PublishListener] Publish message: publishing finished for pubsession 1374098078090

If you see your output in the log, congratulations you’ve successfully written and deployed your first PublishEventListener.

Stay tuned for part two of this series where I’ll show you how to audit the assets delivered with each publish.