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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