VOD export

General architecture

The Content and Product Manager (CPM) provides an interface allowing exporting VOD content to an external system. The interface takes the form of XML files.

Processing logic

The file generation for this interface will be triggered automatically at regular intervals as defined by a CRON expression present in the configuration of the export. On-demand export is also supported – see Manually triggering content export.

File name

The names of the generated files will have the following form:

ExportVod-<ExecutionPageNumber>-<now>.xml

where:

• ExportVod is a fixed value.
• <ExecutionPageNumber> is the number of the page containing the content publishing windows objects contained in the corresponding XML file (e.g. if number of cpw=160 and pagesize=50, there will be 4 XML exported in one export execution numbered from 1 to 4 and the last one will contain only 10 cpw).
• <now> is the current date and time of the algorithm’s execution, using GMT time zone. The format is yyyyMMddHHmmss.

Each run of the export will create a set of XML files based on the paging configuration of the APS.

The file name can be customized in the APS, by using the exportFileName property. For example:

exportFileName= CustomPrefix –{EXTERNALNODEID}-{PAGENUMBER}-{TIMESTAMP}.xml

where:

• {EXTERNALNODEID} will be replaced by the external node id.
• {PAGENUMBER}  will be replaced by the page number (file number) regarding paging/sorting mechanism.
• {TIMESTAMP}  will be replaced by the timestamp in format  yyyyMMddHHmmss.

File transfer mechanism

The FTP transfer is done in two steps. First, the file is copied into the remote target directory with a temporary file extension suffix. Then secondly, once the file transfer is complete, the file is renamed by removing the temporary suffix.  This two-step process ensures that the file consumer does not try to access the file before it has been fully transferred.

For the FTP transfer, the exporter (CEX) acts as an FTP client, with the FTP server role taken by the target system.

The target system is responsible for deleting the transferred XML files once it has processed them, either successfully or not.

If a network error occurs during the file copy, the transfer will be aborted. The CPM relies on the FTP server to clean up any partially copied files when such errors occur.

XML file format

The whole XML schema of this interface is available as reference document  Nagravision-Vod-Export-Specification-v5.x.xsd.

The CPM will validate all generated export files using the referenced schema file located within the application resources.

The XSD does not enforce any minimum or maximum lengths for string values.

The XML files built by the CPM will be encoded in UTF-8.

Related documents

The supporting documents are as follows: