ContentGrid has 2 main web interfaces. One of them for managing applications, is called the Console. The web UI for using ContentGrid applications is called Navigator.
The Console enables you to create projects, model blueprints and deploy applications.
Navigator is the out-of-the-box end user interface for every ContentGrid applications and allows you to create, search, consult and delete entities.
A step-by-step guide on how to create entities, attributes and relations.
Add permissions to entities using policies.
Act on events using webhooks.
Before creating a data model, you need to create a project.
You can do that with the “Create Project” button on the organization page:
In the pop-up dialog you can give your project a name:
Next, you have to select a blueprint to work with:
Now you can start the data modeling by clicking the Data model menu item:
In the Data model tool you can model your business entities.
You start by creating your first “Entity” by clicking the “Add Entity” button and give it a name.
Now that you created your first entity, you’ll see that you can still edit the name of the entity or delete it.
An entity can have attributes and relations to other entities. When you create an attribute in an entity a dialog will pop up with a few options:
Attribute options:
You can also model relationships to other entities, or even to the same entity. To add a new relation to the entity, click the “Add Relation” button, and you will see a pop-up dialog:
When adding a relation, you have some options to configure:
ContentGrid takes a different approach to permissions than legacy content management systems. Instead of making a complex hierarchical tree structure of permissions with inheritance, a set of permission policies describes access for each entity. These policies are rules that contain logical expressions, making use of (a combination of) entity attributes and user attributes.
First, go to the Permissions modeler:
To create our first policy, we first have to choose the entity for which we are going to create a policy:
When clicking the “Create Policy” button you will see the configuration options for creating a new policy:
First, you’ll have to choose for which operation this policy will be evaluated. The options are: Read, Create, Update, Delete. You can choose one or more operations.
By choosing the visibility setting, you can define if this policy is applicable for authenticated users only, or for all users.
The “Additional conditions” section is where you define the conditions for this policy, access to the entity is granted when the conditions are fulfilled.
Multiple conditions can be applied, and each rule has a left and a right side, that are compared to each other. Both left and right sides of can be a “user attribute”, “entity attribute” or constant. The possible comparisons between the left and the right side are:
You can add more conditions with the “Add Condition” button. All conditions have to be satisfied before a policy grants access. Save the policy with the “Add Policy” button.
Now, you should see your policy for this entity in the overview.
Webhooks are one way that ContentGrid applications can send automated messages or information to external systems. They are almost always faster than polling, and require less work on your end.
Each mutating operation on an resource is handled individually and is asynchronously, but almost immediately delivered to the configured webhook endpoint.
A ContentGrid Webhook
First, go to the Webhooks modeler:
To create our first Webhook, we first have to click on Create Webhook:
When clicking the “Create Webhook” button you will see the configuration options for creating a new Webhook:
After clicking save, the Webhook is saved and is listed in the overview but will only be available to your ContentGrid runtime application once you create a new release.
You can add more Webhooks with the “Create Webhook” button.
A Webhook endpoint has some specific constraints and must respect the following implementation details:
ContentGrid signs JWTs using asymmetric encryption (RS256), and publishes the public signing keys in a JWKS (JSON Web Key Set).
The signing keys are rotated on a regular basis.
One of the benefits of JSON Web Token (JWT) is that you can validate a token using an easy cryptographic operation.
A JSON Web Key (JWK) is a JSON data structure that represents a cryptographic key. JWKs are a set of keys shared between different services and are used to verify the JWT token from the authorization server.
You should only be validating the received JWT against ContentGrid Json Web Key (JWK) URL which is ${CONTENTGRID_URL}/.well-known/jwks.json
We use JWKS to expose the public keys used by the ContentGrid platform to all the clients required to validate signatures.
For more information you can check the JWK RFC
The example of a JWKS is something that looks like this:
{
"keys": [
{
"use": "sig",
"kty": "RSA",
"kid": "UVelusmvyM2xScEu0F_xSNlhelC5jZTD77R_3mmOZXs",
"alg": "RS256",
"n": "...yjXzcFpbMJB1fIFam9lQBeXWbTqzJwbuFbspHMsRowa8FaPw44l2C9Q42J3AdQD8CcN...",
"e": "AQAB"
},
{
...
}
]
}In the above example some important fields are
{
"kid": "UVelusmvyM2xScEu0F_xSNlhelC5jZTD77R_3mmOZXs",
"alg": "RS256"
}.{
"aud": "https://webhooks-demo.rtp-scw-sandbox.contentgrid.cloud/broker-process",
"exp": 1679044765,
"iat": 1679044465,
"jti": "df475d5a-fc0e-4fca-a03a-c279e86fe9ed"
}.[Signature]Here is a Java exmaple of how to validate a JWT using JWKs with Nimbus JOSE + JWT
ResourceRetriever jwkSetRetriever = new DefaultResourceRetriever();
JWKSource<SecurityContext> jwkSource = new RemoteJWKSet<>(URI.create("${CONTENTGRID_URL}/.well-known/jwks.json").toURL(), jwkSetRetriever);
JWSKeySelector<SecurityContext> jwsKeySelector = JWSAlgorithmFamilyJWSKeySelector.fromJWKSource(jwkSource);ConfigurableJWTProcessor<SecurityContext> jwtProcessor = new DefaultJWTProcessor<>();
jwtProcessor.setJWSKeySelector(jwsKeySelector);
jwtProcessor.setJWTClaimsSetVerifier((claims, context) -> {
final Date now = new Date();
final Date exp = claims.getExpirationTime();
if (exp != null) {
if (now.after(exp)) {
throw new BadJWTException("expired");
}
}
}); SignedJWT signedJWT = SignedJWT.parse(THE_JWT);
jwtProcessor.process(signedJWT, null);This short guide provides the basic steps required to locally verify an access or ID token signed by ContentGrid. It uses packages from Nimbus JOSE + JWT for key parsing and token validation, but the general principles should apply to any JWT validation library.
ContentGrid Navigator is the out-of-the box frontend for you ContentGrid application. The interface will adapt automatically to the entities and attributes you have configured.
An overview of the different UI elements of Navigator.
Guide on how to create new entities with metadata and relations.
The entity menu allows you to select an entity type for search and creation. The selected entity is highlighted.
In the search form you can search on the searchable metadata of the entity and it’s related entities, as defined in the Console.
The results table shows up after search and displays the search results as a table with metadata. Clicking one of the lines in the table will open the document preview.
Clicking the create entity button will bring you to create form where you can fill in the metadata, files and link the relations for this entity.
The document preview will display a preview of the line selected in the results table. If there are multiple files attached to that entity, there will be a dropdown selector to choose what file you want to preview.
The previewer can natively show PDF’s and images. For other documents, ContentGrid will attempt to transform the file to PDF. Currently, these formats are supported for previewing:
Of course, other file formats can still be used in ContentGrid, but they don’t have out-of-the-box previews.
In the create form you can fill in the metadata fields of the entity you are creating. Mandatory fields are indicated with an asterisk. Datetime fields have a datetime picker. Content fields support drag and drop and opening a file picker.
If your entity has a relation to another relation, you will see that in the form. The link data button will bring you to the link relation popover where you can link the correct entities.
The extract button will open a pop-up to start an automated metadata extraction using AI based on the files you already uploaded in the form.
These buttons allow you to submit or cancel the entity creation.
The document preview allows you to see the documents added next to the form. This can be practical when you need to read data from the document to fill in the form. The extract feature will also overlay information in the preview when used.
After clicking the link data button in the create form a popover will appear that will help you link related entities.
The search form in this popover functions similarly to the entity search form and searches on the linked entity.
After pressing the “SEARCH” or “SHOW ALL” button, the results table shows the candidates for linking. Just click a line to link the entity. It is possible to link multiple entities if it is a “TO MANY” relationship.
This button will open a new tab on the create form of the entity type you are trying to link. Use this when the entity you want to link does not yet exist.