What is SOAP?

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment.

It uses XML technologies to define an extensible messaging framework providing a message construct which can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols.

The framework has been designed to be independent of any particular programming model and other implementation specific semantics.

What can the eRez SOAP SDK do for you?

The SOAP interface for the eRez Imaging Server extends the eRez Imaging Server functionality by making eRez available programmatically from other software packages.

The SOAP Web Service can be used by other software to retrieve information and process images with eRez. The SOAP SDK is completely independent of platform and programming language and is supported by Java, .NET and many other platforms and languages.

What can you do with the eRez SOAP SDK?

• CMS (Content Management System) integration

• ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) integration

• Workflow adaptation

• Database integration

• Many other functions are possible as well

By using the SOAP SDK third party applications enpowers eRez to work with . . .

Information embedded within images.

The eRez imaging server handles important information about images such as: photographers name, copyright holder, license information, keywords, and subject matter such information is stored in IPTC fields within the image. External applications can use eRez to write info to image IPTC fields or retrieve info using SOAP as the interface, as well as XMP data from image files. (“XMP stands for “eXtensible Metadata Platform”), which is a standard, XML-based, W3C-compliant way of embedding metadata in files.

Using SOAP your application can also have eRez retrieve textual information for a file as ASCII, HTML or XML formatted text.

eRez file information and manipulation.

• Use eRez to copy, delete, move or rename files.

• Retrieve filename extensions from designated eRez download templates in order to correctly name the files.

• Retrieve an alphabetically sorted list of files and folders in a specified eRez folder.

• Store lists of file paths and names as a collection and have eRez return unique IDs to your application.

The eRez job queue.

• Through SOAP you can add image processing jobs to the eRez Asynchronous Queue (download queue).

• Some applications can retrieve info about job status in the eRez asynchronous download queue. This can be information about jobs waiting in a queue and to see if an image is being processed or packed for transmission.

• It is possible for external applications to:
• Retrieve info on whether a package is complete and ready for download.
• Know if the job failed or was stopped by the user.
• Know if there is insufficient source image data.

Accessing eRez.

• Through SOAP your application can have eRez perform specific searches on information stored within images or about images, i.e. IPTC and XMP information etc.