OpenSocial Data Pipelining

Data Pipelining is a technique in OpenSocial which allows developers to request data from either the OpenSocial container or any HTTP endpoint using XML tags. Once the data has been obtained it can be used in a number of ways

• Processed via OpenSocial Templates for display purposes
• Passed to a Proxied URI via POST

The OpenSocial specification defines two different kinds of datapipelining: standard data and the social gadget data.

Standard Data

os:DataRequest - This function allows developers to request OpenSocial information such as person data.

os:HttpRequest - This function allows developers to request data from an arbitrary URL. Similar to a REST web service request. Supports both GET and POST HTTP methods

osVar - This function allows developers to build a JSON object containing values that they wish to "pipeline" to a template or proxied page. Developers can use both literal values or EL statements within this tag.

Social Gadget Data

In addition to the standard data pipeling requests, which are part of the Core Gadget Specification, the Social Gadget Specification adds support for the following tags. Nearly all of this data can be retrieved using os:DataRequest, however, these tags provide a shorter syntax for performing the requests

os:PeopleRequest - This function allows developers to get profile information for a group or a list of people.

os:ViewerRequest - This function allows developers to get the viewer's profile information

os:OwnerRequest - This function allows developers to get the owner's profile information

os:ActivityStreamRequest - This function allows developers to get a set of activity entries for a given viewer, owner or group.

Passing Data to a Proxied URI via POST

Data obtained via data pipelining can easily be passed to a proxied URI. OpenSocial sends this data packaged as a JSON Object via the HTTP POST method.

Example