Introduction

Geoserver extension to provide a REST interface (XML)for extracting info for documentation generation. This extension is currently tested with Geoserver 2.4.8 and 2.6.5. Contributions to make this extension compatible with more recent versions of Geoserver are very welcome.

Installation

Dependencies

The build process uses make,maven and zip. For the compile step is a Java JDK necessary. To install these dependencies unter debian/ubuntu linux run (maybe with sudo):

apt-get install make maven openjdk-8-jdk unzip

Building the extension

Run

make build

The generated JARs will be in the target/ directory.

Installing into Geoserver

To install this extension, follow these steps:

• Drop all JARs of the target directory to geoservers WEB-INF/lib/ directory. The target directory will also contain the dependencies which are not already bundled with geoserver.
• Restart geoserver.
• Congratulations, you're done.

Usage

Examples

Complete route

curl -u admin:geoserver http://hostname:8080/geoserver/rest/documentor/complete.xml

Specific workspace with one shapefile datasource and one layer published.

curl -u admin:geoserver http://hostname:8080/geoserver/rest/documentor/workspaces/it.geosolutions.xml

Output would be something like this:

<de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.WorkspaceFullDoc>
  <name>it.geosolutions</name>
  <layers>
    <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.LayerDoc>
      <workspaceName>it.geosolutions</workspaceName>
      <name>states</name>
      <title defined-in="de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.LayerBaseDoc">states</title>
      <nativeName>states</nativeName>
      <type>vector</type>
      <featureType>
        <properties>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            <name>the_geom</name>
            <type>MultiPolygon</type>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            <name>STATE_NAME</name>
            <type>String</type>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            <name>STATE_FIPS</name>
            <type>String</type>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            <name>SUB_REGION</name>
            <type>String</type>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
        </properties>
      </featureType>
      <store>
        <workspaceName>it.geosolutions</workspaceName>
        <name>states_test</name>
        <type>Shapefile</type>
      </store>
      <isAdvertized>true</isAdvertized>
      <isEnabled>true</isEnabled>
      <defaultStyle>
        <name>polygon</name>
      </defaultStyle>
      <keywords>
        <string>features</string>
        <string>states</string>
      </keywords>
    </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.LayerDoc>
  </layers>
</de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.WorkspaceFullDoc>

The documentor respects the permissions of the credentials that are supplied via the request. It is advised to create a seperate account for the documentor and grant only the permission to ressources you want to be able to query.

Documenting Postgresql relations

Documentor documents the relations used by a layer by default. This also includes for example all tables referenced by a view when geoserver uses a view as its datasource. This feature makes geoserver-documentor extremely helpful to document dependencies of tables and views in your database.

Example

<de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.WorkspaceFullDoc>
  <name>example</name>
  <layers>
    <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.LayerDoc>
      <workspaceName>example</workspaceName>
      <name>schicht</name>
      <title defined-in="de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.LayerBaseDoc">schicht</title>
      <nativeName>schicht</nativeName>
      <type>vector</type>
      <featureType>
        <properties>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            <name>bohrprofil_id</name>
            <type>Integer</type>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            <name>schichten_id</name>
            <type>Integer</type>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            <name>tiefe</name>
            <type>Float</type>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
        </properties>
        <relatedTables>
          <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.TableDoc>
            <tableName>schicht</tableName>
            <tableSchema>bohrung</tableSchema>
            <type>TABLE</type>
            <comment>Erfassung der einzelnen Bohrprofilschichten</comment>
            <isMainTable>true</isMainTable>
            <columns>
              <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
                <name>schicht_id</name>
                <type>int4</type>
                <comment>Feature ID</comment>
              </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
              <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
                <name>bohrprofil_id</name>
                <type>int4</type>
                <comment>Foreign Key: ID der Tabelle bohrprofil</comment>
              </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
              <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
                <name>schichten_id</name>
                <type>int4</type>
              </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
              <de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
                <name>tiefe</name>
                <type>float4</type>
                <comment>Tiefe der Schichtgrenze [m]</comment>
              </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.PropertyDoc>
            </columns>
          </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.TableDoc>
        </relatedTables>
      </featureType>
      <store>
        <workspaceName>example</workspaceName>
        <name>example</name>
        <type>PostGIS</type>
        <info>
          <entry>
            <string>DB name</string>
            <string>bodo</string>
          </entry>
          <entry>
            <string>Postgresql Version</string>
            <string>PostgreSQL 9.5.6 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.4) 5.4.0 20160609, 64-bit</string>
          </entry>
          <entry>
            <string>PostGIS version</string>
            <string>2.2 USE_GEOS=1 USE_PROJ=1 USE_STATS=1</string>
          </entry>
        </info>
      </store>
      <isAdvertized>true</isAdvertized>
      <isEnabled>true</isEnabled>
      <keywords>
        <string>features</string>
        <string>schicht</string>
      </keywords>
    </de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.LayerDoc>
  </layers>
</de.geops.geoserver.documentor.info.WorkspaceFullDoc>

Syntax for directives in comments

These directives so far are supported in comments on Postgresql tables and views:

  Directives:

    * ignore
      ignore the current entity

    * include-ref [reference]
      Also load the documentation for the referenced entity

    * ignore-ref [reference]
      Ignore the reference to the specified entity


  References:

  The syntax to reference tables is

      table:[table schema].[table name]

  Quoted identifiers are allowed.

Example script

Take a look at an example script uses the the documentor REST interface and generates a file structure with .rst files that can be rendered into several output formats via Sphinx for example.

Known issues

Fetching the Webservice in JSON-Format fails

2014-11-05 11:48:05,091 ERROR [geoserver.rest] - Exception intercepted
java.util.EmptyStackException
    at org.codehaus.jettison.util.FastStack.peek(FastStack.java:39)
    at org.codehaus.jettison.mapped.MappedXMLStreamWriter.setNewValue(MappedXMLStreamWriter.ja
    at org.codehaus.jettison.mapped.MappedXMLStreamWriter.writeCharacters(MappedXMLStreamWrite
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.StaxWriter.setValue(StaxWriter.java:158)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.SingleValueConverterWrapper.marshal(SingleValueConv
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.core.TreeMarshaller.convert(TreeMarshaller.java:70)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.core.TreeMarshaller.convertAnother(TreeMarshaller.java:58)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.reflection.AbstractReflectionConverter.marshallFiel
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.reflection.AbstractReflectionConverter$2.writeField
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.reflection.AbstractReflectionConverter$2.<init>(Abs
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.reflection.AbstractReflectionConverter.doMarshal(Ab
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.reflection.AbstractReflectionConverter.marshal(Abst
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.core.TreeMarshaller.convert(TreeMarshaller.java:70)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.core.TreeMarshaller.convertAnother(TreeMarshaller.java:58)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.core.TreeMarshaller.convertAnother(TreeMarshaller.java:43)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.collections.AbstractCollectionConverter.writeItem(A
    at org.geoserver.config.util.XStreamPersister$ProxyCollectionConverter.writeItem(XStreamPe
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.collections.CollectionConverter.marshal(CollectionC
    [...]

This is an issue with jettison 1.0.x. An Upgrade of the jettision jar to 1.3.x fixes this issue, but jettison changed its object and array nesting in JSON format slightly between these versions. This will affect all of geoservers REST services. The better solution would be to just use the XML format.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13804878/spring-batch-spring-batch-admin-project and https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JETTISON-70