Storage item configuration

Dari provides the StorageItem class for storing file-based data in a Brightspot project. An object that references a file must declare a StorageItem object, which represents the referenced file in the underlying file system or cloud service. Among other file-related information, a StorageItem object includes a path to the file that it represents.

A project’s storage item implementation must be configured. For the Tomcat servlet container, the context.xml file is used.

Storage locations are specified with the dari/storage/{storageName}/ namespace, where storageName is a unique string. Multiple storage locations can be configured with different storageName values, with the applicable storage location specified when you create a StorageItem object. You can also set a default storage location, where new StorageItem objects are stored automatically. (For information about default configurations, see Configuration identifiers, key prefixes, and defaults.)

The following example from a Tomcat context.xml file shows how a namespace is used to uniquely identify a storage location for file-based data. In this case, the storage location is identified as tutorial.source, and all configuration options for this storage location share the same namespace. Essentially, the following configuration directs a LocalStorageItem object to place all file-based data into a folder called .storage.

<!-- Storage -->
<Environment name="dari/storage/tutorial.source/class" type="java.lang.String" value="com.psddev.dari.util.LocalStorageItem"/>
<Environment name="dari/storage/tutorial.source/baseUrl" type="java.lang.String" value="http://localhost:9480/"/>
<Environment name="dari/storage/tutorial.source/rootPath" type="java.lang.String" value=".storage"/>
<Environment name="dari/defaultStorage" type="java.lang.String" value="tutorial.source"/>

You can copy file-based data from one Brightspot project to another with Dari’s Storage Item tool. The tool must be configured with source and destination storage locations. For example, to copy file-based data from a Brightspot project running on localhost to another Brightspot project running on a remote server named “brutus”, you would extend the above configuration with another storage location identified with a different namespace, in this case tutorial.target. When you run the tool, two storage locations will be available to select from: tutorial.source and tutorial.target.

<Environment name="dari/storage/tutorial.target/class" type="java.lang.String" value="com.psddev.dari.util.LocalStorageItem"/>
<Environment name="dari/storage/tutorial.target/baseUrl" type="java.lang.String" value="http://brutus:9480/"/>
<Environment name="dari/storage/tutorial.target/rootPath" type="java.lang.String" value=".storage"/>

Each storage item implementation has a different set of configurations options. Below are configuration options for two common implementations. LocalStorageItem represents files stored on a local disk. S3StorageItem represents file-based data stored on the Amazon S3 cloud service.