Tridion Business Connector client

A command line tool for scripting

A bit of a niche entry this one.  Will only be of interest to those who use Tridion, one of the more ‘heavyweight’ CMS solutions.

I generally have a number of repetitive tasks that are extremely tedious to accomplish using the browser based GUI.  So I constructed a simple command line tool that allows me to script tasks using a SOAP interface known as the Tridion Business Connector.

The client takes the following arguments:

bcclient.exe /h [hostname] /u [user] /p [password] /d [domain] /x "[request XML]"
 

Why did I build this?  Very useful when called via scripting tools.  In my case, Perl.

A simple Perl script that will return the XML for a Tridion Component would look something like this:

use strict;
 
my $requestXML = q{
	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
	<tcmapi:Message version="5.0" from="AndyRowlandSoapClient" failOnError="true" xmlns:tcmapi="http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0/TCMAPI">
		<tcmapi:Request ID="GetItemRequest" preserve="true">
			<tcmapi:GetItem itemURI="tcm:12-345" />
		</tcmapi:Request>
	</tcmapi:Message>
	};
 
$requestXML =~ s/"/\\"/g;
 
my $responseXML = `bcclient.exe /h MyTCMHost /u andyrowland /p mypassword /d MYDOMAIN /x "$requestXML"`;
 
print $responseXML;
We could add a layer of abstraction, and wrap up the SOAP call within a subroutine, something like:
sub make_request {
	my $messageXML = shift;
	my $requestXML = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><tcmapi:Message version="5.0" from="AndyRowlandsSoapClient" failOnError="true" xmlns:tcmapi="http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0/TCMAPI">' . $messageXML . '</tcmapi:Message>';
 
	$requestXML =~ s/"/\\"/g;
 
	my $responseXML = `bcclient.exe /h MyTCMHost /u andyrowland /p mypassword /d MYDOMAIN /x "$requestXML"`;
 
	return XML::Simple::XMLin($responseXML);
}

Note the use the module XML::Simple to convert the response XML into a Perl data structure.

We can then create a succession of subroutines to perform a variery of routine tasks.  To get a Tridion item:

sub get_item {
	my $URI = shift;
 
	my $messageXML = qq{
		<tcmapi:Request ID="GetItemRequest" preserve="true">
			<tcmapi:GetItem itemURI="$URI" />
		</tcmapi:Request>
		};
 
	my $ref = make_request($messageXML);
 
	if ($ref->{'tcmapi:Response'}{'success'} eq 'true'){
		return $ref;
	} else {
		die "ERROR: Could not get item $URI";
	}
}

Back to articles 2009-01-19 00:08:14 UTC

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