Deke Smith

Besides conventional client access to Web sites using a browser, client applications can be built within applications such as Flex and still access data in our repositories. A quick way of doing this is by having Flex access that data as JSON. There is one thing that makes this problematic for production. When a publish instance is accessed through Dispatcher it is suggested that any access to URLs ending with the .json suffix should be forbidden. For security reasons many directories in the repository should not be accessible through outward facing connections. Like I mentioned, this can be problematic if JSON is being accessed by Flex.

Sling, and by extension CQ, has a redirect mechanism that can selectively expose values.

Pre-requisites

Knowledge of the use of CRXDE or CRXDE Lite to edit nodes and properties is required for the example.

What are sling:Mapping nodes?

Sling uses sling:Mapping nodes much the same way that Apache’s mod redirect uses its configurations in httpd to define redirect behavior. The Apache Sling Web site has documentation for mappings. Existing mappings can be seen in the Sling Resource Resolver Console at http://[host]:[port]/system/console/jcrresolver.

A brief explanation is that redirect behavior can be configured by setting properties on sling:Mapping nodes. There should be one sling:Mapping node per redirect rule. The sling:Mapping nodes can have nested sling:Mapping nodes, but that is not needed for my simple example and I won’t go there at this time. Add the sling:Mapping nodes to the repository within the /etc/map/ directory. Sub-folders can be created in this directory and that has an effect on how URLs are matched for redirecting. Once again, this article does not need this and I won’t get into that. This framework can be very powerful and has many ways of being configured. The use case for the sling:Mapping node will be basic and simple in this example.

Using redirection to access JSON data behind a securely configured Dispatcher

For this example I will show how to create a redirect that allows access to the possible values of a dialog used to configure a component. The component is the Flash component. The values are for the menu property of the Flash component. That value is contained within the dialog configuration of the Flash component:

|- libs
   |- foundation
      |- components
         |- flash
            |- dialog
               |- items
                  |- menu
                     |- options

The url I used to get the JSON version of this on my local, sample server is [1]. Calling this JSON as admin returns:

{
     "jcr:primaryType":"cq:WidgetCollection",
     "show":{
          "value":"show",
          "jcr:primaryType":"nt:unstructured",
          "text":"Show"
     },
     "hide":{
          "value":"hide",
          "jcr:primaryType":"nt:unstructured",
          "text":"Hide"
     }
}

The direct URL to this value is not available behind Dispatcher. Dispatcher should not allow calls either to the /libs directory nor any resource with a .json suffix.

To make it so the Flex client can query this value we need to set up a mapping for it.

1. Create a node called, menudata, of type sling:Mapping within the /etc/maps/ directory
2. Create a property called, sling:internalRedirect, of type String to the menudata node. Set it to:/libs/foundation/components/flash/dialog/items/advanced/items/menu/options.1.json
3.  Create a property called, sling:match, of type String to the menudata node. Set it to:^[^/]+/[^/]+/menu-options$

Once saved, the redirect takes effect. You should see the values of this mapping if you go to Sling Resource Resolver Console.

The sling:internalRedirect property is the relative URL to a resource within the repository. There are, of course, exceptions. But for this example the value of the internalRedirect property is returned without sending a redirect message back to the browser.

The sling:match property is a regular expression pattern used to match the URL. If this property were not present in the sling:Mapping node it would use the node’s name to match with.

Now, when I go to the URL that calls menu-option ([2] on my local server), the value of the options node is returned.

Standard cautions apply. Be very conservative about what you expose to the outside world. But the redirect mechanism in Sling is very powerful and it is worth exploring.

[1] http://localhost:4502/libs/foundation/components/flash/dialog/items/advanced/items/menu/options.1.json

[2] http://localhost:4502/menu-options