Assets HTTP API

Last update: March 14, 2024

Topics:
Assets HTTP API,Developer Tools

CREATED FOR:

Developer

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Overview

The Assets HTTP API allows for create-read-update-delete (CRUD) operations on digital assets, including on metadata, on renditions, and on comments, together with structured content using Experience Manager Content Fragments. It is exposed at /api/assets and is implemented as REST API. It includes support for Content Fragments.

To access the API:

Open the API service document at https://[hostname]:[port]/api.json.
Follow the Assets service link leading to https://[hostname]:[server]/api/assets.json.

The API response is a JSON file for some MIME types and a response code for all MIME types. The JSON response is optional and may not be available, for example, for PDF files. Rely on the response code for further analysis or actions.

After the Off Time, an asset and its renditions are not available via the Assets web interface and through the HTTP API. The API returns 404 error message if the On Time is in the future or Off Time is in the past.

CAUTION

HTTP API updates the metadata properties in the jcr namespace. However, the Experience Manager user interface updates the metadata properties in the dc namespace.

Content Fragments

A content fragment is a special type of asset. It can be used to access structured data, such as texts, numbers, dates, among others. As there are several differences to standard assets (such as images or documents), some additional rules apply to handling content fragments.

For further information see Content Fragments Support in the Experience Manager Assets HTTP API.

Data model

The Assets HTTP API exposes two major elements, folders and assets (for standard assets).

Additionally, it exposes more detailed elements for the custom data models that describe structured content in Content Fragments. See Content Fragment Data Models for further information.

Folders

Folders are like directories in traditional file systems. They are containers for other folders or asserts. Folders have the following components:

Entities: The entities of a folder are its child elements, which can be folders and assets.

Properties:

name is the name of the folder. This is the same as the last segment in the URL path without the extension.
title is an optional title of the folder which can be displayed instead of its name.

NOTE

Some properties of folder or asset are mapped to a different prefix. The jcr prefix of jcr:title, jcr:description, and jcr:language are replaced with dc prefix. Hence in the returned JSON, dc:title and dc:description contain the values of jcr:title and jcr:description, respectively.

Links Folders expose three links:

self: Link to itself.
parent: Link to the parent folder.
thumbnail: (Optional) link to a folder thumbnail image.

Assets

In Experience Manager an asset contains the following elements:

The properties and metadata of the asset.
Multiple renditions such as the original rendition (which is the originally uploaded asset), a thumbnail and various other renditions. Additional renditions may be images of different sizes, different video encodings, or extracted pages from PDF or Adobe InDesign files.
Optional comments.

For information about elements in Content Fragments see Content Fragments Support in Experience Manager Assets HTTP API.

In Experience Manager a folder has the following components:

Entities: The children of assets are its renditions.
Properties.
Links.

The Assets HTTP API includes the following features:

Retrieve a folder listing.
Create a folder.
Create an asset.
Update asset binary.
Update asset metadata.
Create an asset rendition.
Update an asset rendition.
Create an asset comment.
Copy a folder or asset.
Move a folder or asset.
Delete a folder, asset, or rendition.

NOTE

For the ease of readability the following examples omit the full cURL notation. In fact the notation does correlate with Resty which is a script wrapper for cURL.

Prerequisites

Access https://[aem_server]:[port]/system/console/configMgr.
Navigate to Adobe Granite CSRF Filter.
Make sure the property Filter Methods includes: POST, PUT, DELETE.

Retrieve a folder listing

Retrieves a Siren representation of an existing folder and of its child entities (subfolders or assets).

Request: GET /api/assets/myFolder.json

Response codes: The response codes are:

200 - OK - success.
404 - NOT FOUND - folder does not exist or is not accessible.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Response: The class of the entity returned is an asset or a folder. The properties of contained entities are a subset of the full set of properties of each entity. To obtain a full representation of the entity, clients should retrieve the contents of the URL pointed to by the link with a rel of self.

Create a folder

Creates a new sling: OrderedFolder at the given path. If a * is provided instead of a node name, the servlet uses the parameter name as node name. Accepted as request data is either a Siren representation of the new folder or a set of name-value pairs, encoded as application/www-form-urlencoded or multipart/ form- data, useful for creating a folder directly from an HTML form. Additionally, properties of the folder can be specified as URL query parameters.

An API call fails with a 500 response code if the parent node of the provided path does not exist. A call returns a response code 409 if the folder already exists.

Parameters: name is the folder name.

Request

POST /api/assets/myFolder -H"Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"class":"assetFolder","properties":{"jcr:title":"My Folder"}}'
POST /api/assets/* -F"name=myfolder" -F"jcr:title=My Folder"

Response codes: The response codes are:

201 - CREATED - on successful creation.
409 - CONFLICT - if folder already exist.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Create an asset

Place the provided file at the provided path to create an asset in the DAM repository. If a * is provided instead of a node name, the servlet uses the parameter name or the file name as node name.

Parameters: The parameters are name for the asset name and file for the file reference.

Request

POST /api/assets/myFolder/myAsset.png -H"Content-Type: image/png" --data-binary "@myPicture.png"
POST /api/assets/myFolder/* -F"name=myAsset.png" -F"file=@myPicture.png"

Response codes: The response codes are:

201 - CREATED - if Asset has been created successfully.
409 - CONFLICT - if Asset already exist.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Update an asset binary

Updates an asset’s binary (rendition with name original). An update triggers the default asset processing workflow to execute, if it is configured.

Request: PUT /api/assets/myfolder/myAsset.png -H"Content-Type: image/png" --data-binary @myPicture.png

Response codes: The response codes are:

200 - OK - if Asset has been updated successfully.
404 - NOT FOUND - if Asset could not be found or accessed at the provided URI.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Update asset metadata

Updates the asset metadata properties. If you update any property in the dc: namespace, the API updates the same property in the jcr namespace. The API does not sync the properties under the two namespaces.

Request: PUT /api/assets/myfolder/myAsset.png -H"Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"class":"asset", "properties":{"jcr:title":"My Asset"}}'

Response codes: The response codes are:

200 - OK - if Asset has been updated successfully.
404 - NOT FOUND - if Asset could not be found or accessed at the provided URI.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Sync metadata update between `dc` and `jcr` namespace

The API method updates the metadata properties in the jcr namespace. The updates made using the user interface change the metadata properties in the dc namespace. To sync the metadata values between dc and jcr namespace, you can create a workflow and configure Experience Manager to execute the workflow upon asset edit. Use an ECMA script to sync the required metadata properties. The following sample script synchronizes the title string between dc:title and jcr:title.

var workflowData = workItem.getWorkflowData();
if (workflowData.getPayloadType() == "JCR_PATH")
{
 var path = workflowData.getPayload().toString();
 var node = workflowSession.getSession().getItem(path);
 var metadataNode = node.getNode("jcr:content/metadata");
 var jcrcontentNode = node.getNode("jcr:content");
if (jcrcontentNode.hasProperty("jcr:title"))
{
 var jcrTitle = jcrcontentNode.getProperty("jcr:title");
 metadataNode.setProperty("dc:title", jcrTitle.toString());
 metadataNode.save();
}
}

Create an asset rendition

Create an asset rendition for an asset. If request parameter name is not provided, the file name is used as rendition name.

Parameters: The parameters are name for name of the rendition and file as a file reference.

Request

POST /api/assets/myfolder/myasset.png/renditions/web-rendition -H"Content-Type: image/png" --data-binary "@myRendition.png"
POST /api/assets/myfolder/myasset.png/renditions/* -F"name=web-rendition" -F"file=@myRendition.png"

Response codes: The response codes are:

201 - CREATED - if Rendition has been created successfully.
404 - NOT FOUND - if Asset could not be found or accessed at the provided URI.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Update an asset rendition

Updates respectively replaces an asset rendition with the new binary data.

Request: PUT /api/assets/myfolder/myasset.png/renditions/myRendition.png -H"Content-Type: image/png" --data-binary @myRendition.png

Response codes: The response codes are:

200 - OK - if Rendition has been updated successfully.
404 - NOT FOUND - if Asset could not be found or accessed at the provided URI.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Add a comment on an asset

Creates a new asset comment.

Parameters: The parameters are message for the message body of the comment and annotationData for the Annotation data in JSON format.

Request: POST /api/assets/myfolder/myasset.png/comments/* -F"message=Hello World." -F"annotationData={}"

Response codes: The response codes are:

201 - CREATED - if Comment has been created successfully.
404 - NOT FOUND - if Asset could not be found or accessed at the provided URI.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Copy a folder or an asset

Copies a folder or asset available at the provided path to a new destination.

Request Headers: The parameters are:

X-Destination - a new destination URI within the API solution scope to copy the resource to.
X-Depth - either infinity or 0. Using 0 only copies the resource and its properties and not its children.
X-Overwrite - Use F to prevent overwriting an asset at the existing destination.

Request: COPY /api/assets/myFolder -H"X-Destination: /api/assets/myFolder-copy"

Response codes: The response codes are:

201 - CREATED - if folder/asset has been copied to a non-existing destination.
204 - NO CONTENT - if the folder/asset has been copied to an existing destination.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if a request header is missing.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Move a folder or an asset

Moves a folder or asset at the given path to a new destination.

Request Headers: The parameters are:

X-Destination - a new destination URI within the API solution scope to copy the resource to.
X-Depth - either infinity or 0. Using 0 only copies the resource and its properties and not its children.
X-Overwrite - Use either T to force delete an existing resources or F to prevent overwriting an existing resource.

Request: MOVE /api/assets/myFolder -H"X-Destination: /api/assets/myFolder-moved"

Do not use /content/dam in the URL. A sample command to move assets and overwriting existing ones is:

curl -u admin:admin -X MOVE https://[aem_server]:[port]/api/assets/source/file.png -H "X-Destination: https://[aem_server]:[port]/api/assets/destination/file.png" -H "X-Overwrite: T"

Response codes: The response codes are:

201 - CREATED - if folder/asset has been copied to a non-existing destination.
204 - NO CONTENT - if the folder/asset has been copied to an existing destination.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if a request header is missing.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Delete a folder, an asset, or a rendition

Deletes a resource (-tree) at the provided path.

Request

DELETE /api/assets/myFolder
DELETE /api/assets/myFolder/myAsset.png
DELETE /api/assets/myFolder/myAsset.png/renditions/original

Response codes: The response codes are:

200 - OK - if folder has been deleted successfully.
412 - PRECONDITION FAILED - if root collection cannot be found or accessed.
500 - INTERNAL SERVER ERROR - if something else goes wrong.

Tips and limitations

HTTP API updates the metadata properties in the jcr namespace. However, the Experience Manager user interface updates the metadata properties in the dc namespace.
Assets HTTP API does not return the complete metadata. The namespaces are hardcoded and only those namespaces are returned. For complete metadata, see the asset path /jcr_content/metadata.json.

recommendation-more-help

Assets HTTP API

Overview

Content Fragments

Data model

Folders

Assets

Retrieve a folder listing

Create a folder

Create an asset

Update an asset binary

Update asset metadata

Sync metadata update between dc and jcr namespace

Create an asset rendition

Update an asset rendition

Add a comment on an asset

Copy a folder or an asset

Move a folder or an asset

Delete a folder, an asset, or a rendition

Tips and limitations

Sync metadata update between `dc` and `jcr` namespace