XC eXternal Services Framework API

The XC External module is an API for external sources. External sources are those web services, which provides some additional contents, which can be used in a library catalog, like cover pages, table of content, reviews, full text availibility etc. This module helps to store those information in a cache, so you don't need to always call external API-s to get content or image URLs.

The API defines the following constants:

• XC_EX_COVER_SMALL ('cover_small') - a small cover image
• XC_EX_COVER_MEDIUM ('cover_medium') - a medium size cover image
• XC_EX_COVER_LARGE ('cover_large') - a large size cover image
• XC_EX_INDEX ('index') - an index page, which collects all the mashupable content types
• XC_EX_SUMMARY ('summary') - a summary information
• XC_EX_SAMPLE_CHAPTER ('sample_chapter') - a sample chapter of a book
• XC_EX_TOC ('toc') - a table of content
• XC_EX_REVIEW ('review') - reviews of the book
• XC_EX_COMMENT ('comment') - comments on the book

The API creates two tables: one ('xc_external_connection') for the identifiers, like ISBN, ISSN, UPC, OCLC, LoC numbers, and other ('xc_external') for the service's content like the he URL of the small cover image. One service can be linked with different identifiers, e.g. an ISBN and an OCLC number could refer the same entity, so if the record has multiple identifiers, we can search mashupable data from different sources.