Managing Resource Type Entities (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

In this screencast, you will discover how you can use the OSF for Drupal user interface to browse, filter and search for Resource entities that have been indexed in Open Semantic Framework (OSF) datasets. You will see how you can use it to manage what you want to expose on your Drupal portal.

Then you will see how you can create, update, delete and export Resource entities using Drupal.

Finally you will discover the revisioning system, and the revisioning user interface that is available to the Drupal administrators.


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Configuring and Using OSF FieldStorage (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

This screencast introduces you to another one of the most important OSF for Drupal connector: the OSF FieldStorage module. What this module does is to create a new FieldStorage type for Drupal7. It enables Drupal7 to save the values of its Content Types fields into another storage system than the default one (i.e MySQL in most of the cases).

Because of the way that the Field system has been designed in Drupal7, it is possible to save the values of different fields that compose the same Content Type bundle into different field storage system. For example, if your Content Type bundle is composed of 10 fields, then 4 of them could be saved into MySQL and 6 of them into OSF.

The main purpose of the OSF FieldStorage module is to be able to save Drupal local Content Type information into OSF. What that means is that all your Drupal7 local content then become accessible, manageable and manipulatable using the 27 Open Semantic Framework (OSF) web services endpoints. Your local Drupal content can then be shared with other Drupal instances that could use OSF for Drupal to connect to that same OSF instance and seamlessly republish/re-purpose that local content from the other Drupal portal.

Here is the documentation of the architecture of this connector module.

This is the power of the OSF FieldStorage connector module. It supports the following Drupal features:

  1. Full FieldStorage API
  2. Entities caching
  3. Revisioning
  4. SearchAPI
  5. 29 field widgets
  6. Export feature in 6 formats

In this screencast, you will be introduced to Drupal7’s Field system. Then you will see how the OSF FieldStorage module creates a new FieldStorage type for Drupal7 and how it can be used. Then you will see how to configure the OSF FieldStorage module: to creating new Content Type fields that uses this osf_fieldstorage type, how to map these fields to RDF, how to use one of the 29 supported field widgets, etc.

Finally, you will see how you can synchronize existing Content Type pages (that was created before OSF for Drupal was installed on your Drupal instance) into a OSF instance.

 


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Configuring and Using OSF Entities (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

This screencast introduces you to one of the most important OSF for Drupal connector: the OSF Entities module. This module creates a new Entity Type called Resource. The description of these entities is managed directly into the Open Semantic Framework (OSF). All the calls to the core entity API function like: entity_load(), entity_save(), entity_create() and entity_delete() are operated with different calls to different OSF web service endpoints.

What this means for a Drupal developer is that they can use Drupal’s Entity API to manage instance records that are hosted remotely in a OSF instance. They don’t have to know how OSF works in order to take advantage of it. They just have to use the API they are used to use. This new Entity Type supports the following Drupal features:

  1. Full Entity API
  2. Entities caching
  3. Revisioning
  4. SearchAPI
  5. Templates selection with inference on their type
  6. 29 field widgets
  7. Export feature in 6 formats

The screencast introduces you to the following aspects of the OSF Entities module:

  1. Introduction to the architecture of the OSF Entities module
  2. Exposing the available entities in OSF into Drupal Bundles and Fields
  3. Browsing and searching for Resource entities
  4. Managing Resource Type bundles
  5. Introduction to the OSF Entity Reference field widget
  6. Creating and updating Resource entities

 


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Managing Datasets in OSF for Drupal (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

In this new screencast, I first introduce the concept of a dataset: what it is, what it is used for and how it works. I will also outline the characteristics of datasets in the Open Semantic Framework (OSF) such as having a set of permissions for group of users, a unique identifier, etc.

Then I explain how datasets are being used by OSF for Drupal, and how they can be managed using a Drupal portal: how to import, create, register, change permissions to datasets. Then I explain how datasets can become searchable using the SearchAPI or be disabled in the web portal.

Finally I cover the OSF Entities administrators search and browse utility which can be used by Drupal administrators to browse and search for all entities that are accessible to the Drupal portal: even the ones that are indexed in datasets that are not yet registered to the portal.

 

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Registering an OSF Network in OSF for Drupal (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

In this screencast, I explain how we can link (register) one or multiple OSF Web Services networks to a single OSF for Drupal instance. I discuss how this OSF Web Services mechanism can be used to bring datasets from multiple different OSF instances into the same Drupal portal. I also cover how we can use the same OSF Web Services network as the backend for multiple Drupal portals (which uses OSF for Drupal).

We briefly discuss the distributed aspect of the Open Semantic Framework (OSF), but this topic will be discussed more in deep in a subsequent screencast.

 

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