The Telligent Evolution Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) gives you examples and guidance for creating powerful features that are custom-tailored to your own needs.
A new version of the platform SDK (version 5.6) is now available.
The Telligent Evolution Platform SDK is a collection of examples, tools, and documentation designed to help you develop applications against the Telligent Evolution platform, the central platform supporting Telligent Enterprise and Telligent Community.
The following sections represent the cumulative information about the platform SDK throughout this release.
The platform SDK contains the source code for sample applications:
- Stand-alone applications:
- Bahbl - Reference application used to drive out v2 REST endpoints. Bahbl is a Twitter-like application that shows you how to use profiles, activity messages, authentication, and other key features of the Evolution REST infrastructure.
- New User Uploader Tool - Short, practical tool showing you how to create new users from a comma separated value (.csv) file.
- Integration tests used to exercise and validate the Telligent Evolution Web services. These are the tests Telligent used during the development of v2 REST Web services. You’ll see exactly how you can implement very granular pieces of functionality, and you’ll see how Telligent approached testing.
- Extensibility examples:
- Widgets:
- Twitter widget controls - Creates controls to display Twitter on a page and send your Telligent Community or Telligent Enterprise status messages to Twitter.
- Modules:
- New group avatar - Assigns a group a random avatar from the group selectable avatars store whenever a new hub is created.
- New user random avatar - Assigns a new member a random avatar from the selectable avatars store when he/she first joins the community.
- Notify on new user create - Sends an email to the specified email addresses when a new user joins the community.
- Table of contents - Creates styled TOC for wikis.
- Spam rule sample:
- Telligent.AkismetSpamRule - Integrates the Akismet spam service.
For more information, see the README file in each sample's folder.
All that is included in the 5.0 version with the addition of:
- Support for GETs for custom profile fields
- New search API
- ASP.NET MVC search site example – A reference application that provides example usage of the REST v2 search endpoint in an external application.
- Track Term Search widgets
- Update to the REST URLs to support .xml and .json extensions:
The recommended URL request format has been changed so that output will be specified using a .xml/.json extension, making it look more like a file extension.
REST v2 Web services continue to support old-style URLs for the time being. This support is scheduled for removal in the Telligent Evolution Platform 6.0 release (Telligent Community 6.0 / Telligent Enterprise 3.0) in favor of the new URL formatting.
Old-style URL:
http://mysite.com/api.ashx/v2/users/2100 - use default output formatting (XML)
http://mysite.com/api.ashx/v2/users/2100/xml - use XML output formatting
http://mysite.com/api.ashx/v2/users/2100/json - use JSON output formatting
New-style URL:
http://mysite.com/api.ashx/v2/users/2100.xml - use XML output formatting
http://mysite.com/api.ashx/v2/users/2100.json - use JSON output formatting
Notice that in the new platform SDK, there is no longer an option to use the default output formatter. You must explicitly identify whether the output is to be .xml or .json. The URL format has changed from using /xml to look more like a file extension with the use of .xml. We believe this change falls more in line with formats used by other popular REST web services.
As stated above, the old-style URL formatting will be honored for the time being - at least for existing endpoints. However, you should consider the old-style formatting to be deprecated because it will be removed in the Telligent Evolution Platform 6.0 release. For any current or future development, we recommend that you use the new-style URL format.
All that is included in the preview 1 version and:
All that is included in the 5.5 version plus:
We have also made a few changes to the REST console:
- The Endpoint URL field now defaults to the site you are accessing instead of localhost and you cannot change this URL from the current site.
- We have added a drop-down list that contains all endpoint URLs. You can now select from the list and your endpoint text box is prefilled with the endpoint URL you select.
- For discoverability, we have added support for displaying the types for each property in the response. You can include the types in the response by simply adding showtypes=true to the query string of the endpoint URL.
Example Info endpoint XML response without types
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Response>
<InfoResult>
<SiteName>Telligent</SiteName>
<Product>Telligent Evolution Platform Developer Build</Product>
<Platform>5.0.40917.7875</Platform>
<Webservice>5.0.40917.7875</Webservice>
</InfoResult>
</Response>
Example Info endpoint XML response with types
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Response>
<InfoResult>
<SiteName Type="string">Telligent</SiteName>
<Product Type="string">Telligent Evolution Platform Developer Build</Product>
<Platform Type="string">5.0.40917.7875</Platform>
<Webservice Type="string">5.0.40917.7875</Webservice>
</InfoResult>
</Response>
Example Info endpoint JSON response without types
{
"InfoResult": {
"SiteName": "Telligent",
"Product": "Telligent Evolution Platform Developer Build",
"Platform": "5.0.40917.7875",
"Webservice": "5.0.40917.7875"
}
}
Example Info endpoint JSON response without types
{
"InfoResult": {
"SiteName": {
"value": "Telligent",
"type": "string"
},
"Product": {
"value": "Telligent Evolution Platform Developer Build",
"type": "string"
},
"Platform": {
"value": "5.0.40917.7875",
"type": "string"
},
"Webservice": {
"value": "5.0.40917.7875",
"type": "string"
}
}
}
Download version 5.5.1 of the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK today.
Read the installation instructions.
All that is included in the 5.5.1 version plus:
- Users, roles and permissions
- Delete users
- Pull current status message when retrieving user information
- Find users by email address
- Validate username/password combinations
- Create, update and delete user roles
- Add or remove users to roles
- Validate user permissions for applications and application content
- Applications
- Retrieve comments for a specific file, wiki page
- Create, update or delete comments on a file, wiki page
- Retrieve, view, create, update or delete files
- Add and remove attachments when creating or updating blog posts, forum threads and forum replies
- Pull application descriptions by GroupID or AppKey
- Groups
- Filter membership list by membership type (owner, manager, member, pending member)
- Pull group list by key (in addition to existing pull by GroupID)
- Pull group list for entire community
- Activity stream
- Filter activities by type to view only or view all but particular activity types
- Pull site-wide and group-specific activity streams (in addition to existing user-specific activity stream)
- Include or exclude status messages from activity stream list
- Site information: Pull timezone offset and serialized timezone
We've also introduced ISO date format support and made building and adding your own custom endpoints much easier with our complete end-to-end CustomEndpoint sample.
New APIs:
- Forums
- View verified and suggested answer count and ratings for forum threads
- Moderate forums
- Add/remove attachments when creating or updating forum threads and/or replies
- Blogs
- Read or write blog posts and comments
- Add/remove attachments when creating or updating blog posts
- Wikis
- View comments for a specific file or wiki page
- Create, update or delete comments on a file or wiki page
- Files
- View, create, update and delete files
- Connections
- Start or contribute to conversations
- Approve and deny friend requests
- Users
- Delete users
- Find users via email address
- Activity streams
- Filter activity stream by type and included or exclude status messages
- View site-wide and group-specific activity streams (in addition to existing user-specific activity streams)
- Groups
- View community-wide group list
- View group lists and application descriptions by GroupID or AppKey
- View group membership by type (owner, manager, pending member, etc.)
- Site Information
- View time zone offset and serialized time zone
- Roles and permissions
- Create, update and delete user roles
- Add or remove users to/from roles
- Validate user permissions for applications and content
- Validate username and password combinations
We have also included a sample widget that overlays our micro-blogging functionality on a map to visualize communications geographically.
Download the Telligent Evolution Platform SDK 5.6 today.
SDK Frequently Asked Questions
This section contains questions that are frequently asked by developers.
What is the developer license?
The developer license enables you to create a Telligent Enterprise or a Telligent Community site, against which you can then create applications or extensions. Install the license from the platform SDK to your development site.
How do I get a developer license?
Contact support to coordinate your license.
What does the developer license entitle me to do?
The developer license enables you to create a set of communities for development purposes only. You may not use the developer license to host live communities. Additionally, the developer license is limited to traffic on a local system and has a number of features restricted from use. See the table below for specifics.
No source code is included in the platform SDK because Telligent Evolution's extensibility points are through the Web services endpoints. Using the Web services will enable you to write the most feature-complete applications and customizations possible while ensuring you're protected from possibly breaking changes in internal APIs.
Are the sample applications open source software? What license are they covered under?
The samples aren't open source software. Telligent doesn't take contributions from the community back into the codebase. However, you're free to do whatever you want with the samples. All sample applications are released within the platform SDK under the MIT open source software license
Where can I find documentation for developing against Telligent Evolution?
We provide a Developer's Guide to help you develop against the Telligent Evolution platform.
Where can I discuss working with Telligent Evolution?
Join our Telligent Evolution community online, which also addresses development questions.
Related information
For information about the Platform SDK in Telligent Evolution release 6.0, see this article.