Developer Blog - API Updates in Preservica 7.7

For a summary of all our APIs, you can use the documentation index page.

Preservica 7.7 is a Cloud-only release and is not a Long Term Support (LTS) release. These API changes will be made available to non-cloud environments with our next LTS release, currently planned to be in the summer of 2025.

Deprecation notices

SOAP web service for managing workflows

This refers to the WSDL web services hosted under /sdb/services/. You should use the REST API (/sdb/rest/workflow) instead if you need to, but you might be able to solve your problem in a better way, e.g. by ingesting content through the Entity API instead.

Web services don't support authentication through our access token mechanism, so this exposes a less secure approach (similar to Basic Auth which we removed from most of our APIs last year). The service is not well documented and lacks functionality we later added to the REST API.

Accessing the workflow services via SOAP has never been supported for cloud users, and I wouldn't expect any of you to be using it. If you are, please get in touch so we can help you select a different approach.

We plan to remove access to this API in the version after the next LTS release.

Reminder: /api/accesstoken/acquire-external

As announced in the 7.6 blog post, we plan to remove this API for security reasons in future. We haven't heard from anyone using it.

Admin API

This API allows you to configure your Preservica system.

Changes since 7.6

• There is a new endpoint at /config-events, which will return a list of config events recorded on your tenant. Config events are a record of changes made to configuration, via the API or UI.

Content API

This API provides a read only view of your archive, search capabilities, asset download and information about entities suitable for a public access portal

Changes since 7.6

• Responses from /object-details may now include identifiers, as well as metadata and links (see the example). The identifier to send is configured on the Collection Properties page. This information will also be available via CMIS (in the extension metadata fragment).

Entity API

The Entity API is the main way we expose information about entities stored in your Preservica system.

Changes since 7.6

• Deleting multiple entities through the API (via a POST to /actions/deletions) will now put each of the entities into a separate deletion group. This means that they'll be reported separately from the GET endpoint, and will appear as separately restorable items in the Recycle Bin in NGI or using the Restore Deleted Entities workflow.

Settings API

This API allows the retrieval of information about settings on your Preservica system.

Changes since 7.6

• There are now endpoints under /ingest to configure ingest configuration. Currently, this is just the default fixity that applies to content ingested into Preservica without any fixity provided (e.g. when you drag-drop content via NGI), but we'll be expanding this in future.
• Endpoints which deal with migration profiles (/migration/config/profiles and PUT of a whole policy at /migration/config/policy, and working with draft policies) allow for the newRepresentationSettings to be an array. You may still send the 'old' form when updating a profile or policy, but the response will include an array. This is to support upcoming improvements to migration profiles. This is a potentially breaking change if you depend on the result of these endpoints; use the versioned API (/api/settings/7.6) to preserve the previous behaviour, or update your client to work with an array.