I come from a system administration background so my first reaction when a problem arises, aside from the usual string of expletives, is to see how perl could make my life easier. This time around, I needed a utility to create an arbitrary amount of pages to reproduce a situation a customer was encountering. With the assistance of our API reference and the wonderful CPAN community, I was able to accomplish this with relative ease.

The first step was to login to the Deki. This is done via standard HTTP web authentication. The LWP::UserAgent module provides a ‘credentials’ method that handles this for us. We simply provide it with the hostname and port (www.example.com:80), authentication realm, username, and password. When we make any requests to the Deki and receive an authorization challenge, this method passes the credentials to the server and retains the cookie in a cookie jar for subsequent requests.

To actually create the new pages, I used the POST:pages/{pageid}/contents API feature. By posting to this URI, I’m able to create and edit pages. For my purposes, I only needed the ‘edittime’ and the ‘title’ query strings to be set. The ‘edittime’ query string is in the format, yyyymmddMMss. To create a page as new, as opposed to editing an existing page, I gave the {pageid} variable a unique name. When all was said and done, this is what the URI looked like:

http://www.example.com/@api/deki/pages/=new_page/contents?edittime=20090303140505&title=new_page

The actual content to be posted to the page is contained within the body of the HTTP request.

Without further ado, here is the code:

http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/User:Brianh/Accessing_the_Deki_API_with_Perl

Image taken by Marshall Astor and licensed under the Creative Commons license.