Alternate way to interact with Tridion Content manager

Question

Is there any other alternative to interact with tridion other than Coreservice from an external application ?

To be specific, can we run the application(external application can be another website/console application) in the CMS server itself with only the dll(content manger dll using which we can interact with Tridion CME) as reference ?

To my knowledge i know only two ways to do it both involves coreservice, 1. Adding coreservice as service reference 2. Adding coreservice client dll and binding it late.

Is there any other way to do it ?

Answer 1

There is a legacy component called Business Connector (SOAP Based Web Service), you will need to create a reference as well. You cannot use Content Manager DLLs from an external machine because of licenses and security reasons.

If your application will run in the Content Manager then you can safely reference the Tridion DLLs and iterate via TOM .Net or TOM.

Answer 2

You can use the Core Service on the content manager server itself.

Per SDL Live Content (requires login), do not use TOM.NET on an SDL Tridion 2011 server for anything but Events and Templates.

The docs specifically mentions the following "detrimental results:"

• Failure to upgrade configurations
• Increased memory usage
• Increased number of database connections (and possible licensing issues)
• Impaired security

The SDL 2011 (GA/HR-1) documentation is a little more lenient towards using TOM.NET (by describing how to update legacy code).

But I'd add from a business and technical community perspective, your team will have more online examples, help from those that have used the Core Service, and open source extensions that use it for custom and external applications. Even in SDL Tridion 2013, the CME itself solely uses the Core Service for its functionality.

Answer 3

You might want to explore using the OData web service on the frontend for accessing Tridion content. It is an alternative to Core Service, but you will only have access to published content.

Answer 4

You should go through this excellent article written by Bart Koopman on Tackling Integrations in SDL Tridion 2011 - Tackle Integrations in SDL Tridion 2011

To Brief - You have following APIs available to interact with Content Manager DB and Content Broker DB:

• Core Service - Interacts with Content Manager DB
• TOM.NET API - Interacts with Content Manager DB (As per Architecture, should be used only in Event Systems, C# TBB and C# Fragments)
• ODATA Service a.k.a Content Delivery Webservice - Interacts with Content Broker DB - i.e. Published Data
• Broker API - Interacts with Content Broker DB - i.e. Published Data

For your case, depending on the type of interaction you required you should only use either Core Service or OData (Content Delivery) Webservice.

Answer 5

I think the why is the question. A few things could be performed..

If you want to just access the content to read it you could use a custom deployer to push the content to a suitable location OR publish out the XML and use that.

Should you wish to be able to edit the items oData or the CoreService are the only real options - the CoreService can be exposed to allow other machines to access this (firewalls etc permitting).