Integrating Sharepoint with WSO2 Governance Registry

WSO2 Governance Registry (GREG) is a fully open source registry-repository for storing and managing service artifacts and other resources.

Microsoft Sharepoint is a web application platform, comprising of multipurpose set of web technologies. Sharepoint has historically been engaged with content and document management. But the latest versions can be used for lot more; document and file management, social networking, websites, intranet, extranet, enterprise search, business intelligence, system integration, process integration and workflow automation. The latest version of Sharepoint is Sharepoint 2013.

In this guide I shall show you how can we integrate Sharepoint resources with WSO2 Governance Registry. This can be useful to govern resources and artifacts stored in Sharepoint in GREG.

In this guide I will create a Sharepoint site and a blog in the site and create a resource in GREG with the blog posts URL.

You can find Sharepoint 2013 installation instructions here.

Let's first create a site in the Sharepoint 2013. You can create a sharepoint site collection using the Sharepoint 2013 Central Administration, which you can find in the start menu. This will prompt you for your Administrative user name and password, which you would have configured at the installation time. Sharepoint 2013 Central Administration window will open up in the browser as shown below.

Sharepoint 2013 Central Administration

You can create a site collection by clicking 'Create site collection' link and following the onscreen instructions. I've created a site collection called 'MySiteCollection' for demonstration and I can access the site collection by navigating to the http://win-nh67lj7lsq4/sites/mysites. You can configure your site collections URL while following the above mentioned instructions. When you navigate to your site collection with the configured URL, you would see a similar window as the following.

Site Collection

You can create a new post by clicking 'Create a post' link and following the onscreen instructions. I've created a blog post called 'My first blog post'. After creating you can see the blog post listed in the site collection as shown in the following screenshot.

A blog post in Sharepoint

You can view the blog post by clicking the blog link. Its URL in my case is http://win-nh67lj7lsq4/sites/mysites/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=3

OK. Now we can import this blog post as a resource in the WSO2 Governance Registry. This would allow us to govern certain aspects of this resource in the WSO2 Governance Registry.

If you haven't downloaded and ran WSO2 Governance Registry, look here for the details. Navigate to the Management console in browser using the URL http://localhost:9443/carbon if you are running the WSO2 Governance Registry in the local machine and running with the default port settings.

Now let's add a resource in the WSO2 Governance Registry, corresponding to the blog post we created in the Sharepoint.  Login to the Management Console and click browse and navigate to a path where you want to store the blog post in WSO2 Governance Registry, Let's say in /_system/governace.

Click the 'Add Resource' and select 'import content from URL' for method, as shown in the following picture. Provide the Sharepoint blog post URL and give it a name. This should import the blog post content into WSO2 Governance Registry.

In case you get an error, that is most probably due to Sharepoint resources are protected. You can't access the Sharepoint resources without the authentication provided. Even if you want to access the WSDL in the browser by providing the link, you will be prompted for credentials. So how do we cope this scenario in the WSO2 Governance Registry? WSO2 products offer an option in the configuration to allow this kind of authentication to external resources happen in the network. Open up the carbon.xml located in GREG_HOME/repository/conf. There you will find a tag named <NetworkAuthenticatorConfig>. Provide the following configuration (of course changing the pattern according to your requirement and provide your credentials).

<NetworkAuthenticatorConfig>
    <Credential>
        <Pattern>http://192.168.1.9.*</Pattern>
        <Type>server</Type>
        <Username>YourUserName</Username>
        <Password>YourPassword</Password>
    </Credential>
</NetworkAuthenticatorConfig>

Provide your Sharepoint username and password for the <Username> and <Password> tags. <Pattern> tag allows any URL pattern matching to that to be authenticated in the WSO2 products. Type can be either 'server' or 'proxy' depending on your type.

After doing this change, you need to restart the WSO2 Governance Registry and attempt the above import. Now it should work.

By clicking the resource link the tree view would take you the following screen where you can do all the conventional governance operations for a resource. You can add lifecycles, tags, comments all in the WSO2 Governance Registry.

If you just want to save the blog post as a URI, you may do so by adding a the Sharepoint Blog URL as a URI artifact. This step will further be described below with adding a WSDL.

I'll wrap up this post by adding a WSDL file of a web service stored in the Sharepoint. The WSDL is of a default web service to list the content of a site collection. The WSDL URL of this service name List is http://win-nh67lj7lsq4/sites/mysites/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx?wsdl. Replace win-nh67lj7lsq4/sites/mysites/ with your configured site URL.

Adding a WSDL in WSO2 Governance Registry would import any dependent schema, create a service artifact type and endpoints (if available). Let's create a WSDL artifact in WSO2 Governance Registry.

Click the Add WSDL in the left pane as shown below.

Provide the WSDL URL and a name for it. This would import the WSDL and create any corresponding artifacts. In this case it creates a List service and an endpoint. You can find the service by clicking the Services in the left pane.  The endpoint dependency can be seen by clicking the 'View Dependency' in the WSDL list as shown below.

Above description indicated the way it imported the WSDL and its dependencies. You might just want to have the WSDL URL stored in WSO2 Governance Registry and not the imported content. This could be done by adding the WSDL as a URI. For that, click the Add URI button in the left pane. This should bring up a window as shown below.

Provide the WSDL URL for URI. Select WSDL for the Type. Provide the name List.wsdl (provide .wsdl extension anyway) and click save. Now go to the List URI. You should be able to see the WSDL listed there as shown below.

Click the List.wsdl. This will bring up the following windows with the dependency and associations listed in the right side.

This guide gave you a very basic guide on how to integrate some of the resources in Sharepoint with WSO2 Governance Registry. You can do lot more with WSO2 Governance Registry. I recommend you download it and play with the product and get more details from WSO2 official documentation from https://docs.wso2.org/.

Hope this guide was useful.

Cheers