Integrating 3rd party imaging systems

It is possible to integrate the Multimedia repository with third party imaging systems. Instead of specifying a location as the value in a ServerMediaPath Registry entry, we use the exec extension to specify a server-side program to be executed. For example:

System|Path|ServerMediaPath|exec imagehandler

indicates that a program called imagehandler located on the Vitalware server is to be used to handle all multimedia requests. The program is required to handle five service types:

When the program is invoked on the server it is passed the service to be provided (namely get, save, list, ping or remove) as its first argument. The program is expected to pass back a status to indicate whether the operation was successful. The status is returned as the header information of the return text. An example return value is:

Status: success (header section)
/tmp/filename (data section)

Each return document consists of a header section and an optional data section.

Most services are called with a filepath as their argument. The filepath is the part of the directory path that is calculated from the multimedia record IRN with the filename appended. Thus if we have a file file.jpg that is associated with multimedia record IRN 12010, the filepath would be 12/010/file.jpg