Can Alfresco Content Services make calls to other applications' APIs?

[cjdavies]

The use case that I have in mind is one in which we want Alfresco to make a call to another application to get some information that is referenced in our internal content. For example, we have a reference to an object (let's say a document) that is managed in an external repository and we want to fetch the latest version into Alfresco.

[jpotts]

Yes, you can extend Alfresco to hit any system that has either a Java API or a RESTful API. There are many places you could add this logic:

 - An action could make the call. This would be a good place to do it if you want the call to be invoked as part of a rule or from a UI action, for example.

 - A web script could make the call. This would be a good place to do it if you want to remotely invoke a RESTful end point on Alfresco and then have that web script make a call to some other system.

 - Some client-side JavaScript could make the call. If the integration is really happening at the UI layer, such as in Share, you could write some client-side JavaScript to call the third-party system's RESTful end point.

So you have a lot of options.