Accessing Sitecore from another web project

Question

Hi All, Okay first let me tell you the story behind the question. We have a Sitecore website, a normal installation which is up and running smoothly. We need to create some items dynamically in Sitecore, a third party company calls a web service and this web service creates the items and publish them. So far it is straight forward, the solution looks simple we could create a web service in the same web site of Sitecore and then we could use the Sitecore API and create items. But now things getting interesting they don't want to put this web service to a server which is open to public. They want to put behind the firewall in to a different server which still has access to Sitecore databases. (And only this third party company has access with some ip filtering) The way I solved the problem, I created a web site for this web service and copied all the configuration and some other folders so I can use Sitecore API from that webservice, but I really don't need most of the configuration I just need a subset so I can create items by using API. Is there a better solution you can think of?

Thanks

Answer 1

Your solution has great potential to cause problems I'm afraid. Sitecore doesn't support what is termed "multiple content masters" hitting the same databases; this will have effect on caching (less of a problem) but could also cause all sorts of havoc in the Sitecore Content Editor.

And then I'm not even touching on the legal issues; you need 2 Sitecore Server licenses to do what you're doing now - did you actually go and buy an extra license just for this? ;-)

Most firewalls today can do protocol based filtering. While not an expert on the subject; wouldn't a combination of authenticated access to the webservice combined with IP restrictions on the SOAP protocol come to the same result? All running on just 1 server?

Answer 2

Is there a reason the service needs to create items in Sitecore? An alternative would be to create a Sitecore data provider that reads from the data source and creates virtual content items in Sitecore. The publishing process would then copy that data into the Sitecore web DB as actual Sitecore content items, disconnecting it from the web service. See SDN for information on creating a data provider.