Customer Aggregator Portal Integrations

Integrate aggregator portals such as Northern Light into your Content Catalyst platform so subscribers can pull in information and data from a range of sources

Aggregator portals allow companies to run searches across content from all the resources they use. This article outlines how to connect a Content Catalyst platform to an aggregator portal for a single account (eg: a customer’s Northern Light instance).  

Below is a breakdown of the various systems and the API calls that can be used to send content from your Content Catalyst platform to an aggregator.

Integrating the content aggregator

1. API calls should be made by an API user created on the Content Catalyst platform, within the customer account.
2. This process requires licensing to be attributed at an account level. (All users within an account have the same access)
3. The customer portal (API user) authenticates with the REST API by calling GET /authenticate.
4. The customer portal retrieves a list of products to be indexed by calling GET /products.

• Calling the APIs as a user in the client’s account on the platform makes it easy for the site to know what content is licensed - setting IncludeUnlicensed to false (default) ensures this.
• UpdatedSince returns reports that have been edited or added since a given date. This must be used to only retrieve new or updated reports since the last update.

5.   The customer portal retrieves metadata and content for listed products and adds this to the portal index using GET /libraries/{LibraryCode}/products/{ProductCode}/metadata and GET /libraries/{LibraryCode}/products/{ProductCode}/indexablecontent.

User journey

1. Portal users find Content Catalyst content in their portal search results (alongside content from other sources).
   
   
2. Portal users see metadata and links for products in the portal feed.
   
   
3. The portal user clicks the link and:

• If already logged in to the Content Catalyst platform, navigate directly to the product page. 
• If not logged in, individual users are redirected to the client customer portal, login and are then redirected to relevant product page. (Alternatively, the GET/authenticate/sessionkey API can provide seamless access through a shared user.)