PDF Box REST Demonstrator

Dropwizard based PDF Box REST Services

Introduction

This represents a development prototype, there's little in the way of exception handling and unit testing. It's a self contained server app that wraps some bits of PDFBox and Preflight functionality as REST services. The services are capable of serving up XML or JSON dependent upon the content type requested. The app also serves also a single page HTML based client that can be used to test the services.

###Technologies The project's a Maven based Java affair, the application is based on DropWizard, this brings together a set of reliable libraries, the following are most used and may prove informative if your reading the code:

• Jetty as a lean HTTP server,
• Jersey for REST services and associated, and
• Jackson for JSON and XML serialisation.

A good place to get going is the Dropwizard getting started guide. The Dropwizard core documentation covers the features used in the code base.

Building and running

###Project structure This is a little rough but it's broken into 3 parts plus a parent but only 2 parts are used.

• pdfbox-rest: The main projects, running mvn clean package here builds the entire project.
• pdfbox-rest-api: Contains the representations, it's effectively the object model and needs a refactor.
• pdfbox-rest-application: The Jetty server and Jersey resources, plus the HTML client code all in one.

###Want to try? First clone this project, cd into it and then trigger the Maven package build.

git clone [email protected]:verapdf/pdfbox-rest.git
cd pdfbox-rest
mvn clean package

That should build but with fewer unit tests than we'd like. Next start up the server:

java -jar ./ pdfbox-rest-application/target/pdfbox-rest-application-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar server

Go to localhost:8080 and try the (basic) client.

Testing with curl

There are a few services available, that aren't all tried by the client, you can test a few things with curl.

###SHA1 digest service POST a file and get the SHA1 Digest and the length returned. A client JavaScript client calculates this before transmitting the file. This service can be used to check that the file hasn't been corrupted. Hash integrity checking's important in the Library and Archive world.

To get the default SHA1 of an empty byte sequence:

curl localhost:8080/sha1/null

to post a file and get the result returned:

curl -F "file=@path/to/a/file/myfile.txt" localhost:8080/sha1

which returns the result in JSON, to get XML try:

curl -F "file=@path/to/a/file/myfile.txt" localhost:8080/sha1 -H "Accept:text/xml" 

###PDF DocInfo only There's a service that just returns the PDF Document Info data, it works on any valid PDF:

curl -F "file=@path/to/a/file/myfile.txt" localhost:8080/pdf/docinfo

again this returns JSON, to get XML try:

curl -F "file=@path/to/a/file/myfile.txt" localhost:8080/pdf/docinfo -H "Accept:text/xml" 

###PDF/A Validation PDFBox Preflight PDF/A 1b Validation

curl -F "file=@path/to/a/file/myfile.txt" localhost:8080/pdf/validate

and for XML try:

curl -F "file=@path/to/a/file/myfile.txt" localhost:8080/pdf/validate -H "Accept:text/xml"