Gumband Strapi Integration

1 Strapi CMS Integration
2 Content Entry Customization

Strapi CMS Integration

To expand the content management capabilities of Gumband, another CMS system called Strapi is shipped as a part of the overall Gumband solution. Within Strapi, custom content types can be created with a variety of field options, and then content can be managed of that content type. The content managed in Strapi is then shared within an Organization and can be assigned to exhibit settings, propagating to any SDK listeners in real time.

Strapi Documentation: https://docs-v3.strapi.io/user-docs/latest/getting-started/introduction.html

Access Strapi

To access Strapi, navigate to your Organization and then click the “Settings” tab. If a “Strapi URL” is properly configured, you should see a “View Organizational Content” link that you can click to open Strapi.

Create a New Content Type

See Introduction to Content-Types Builder

Content-Type names must be unique. If you accidentally (or intentionally) give two Content-Types the same name, this will cause the server to fail and you’ll need to reach out to the #gumband-support channel for some help standing it back up.

Note that content type fields can contain relationships to other content types. In this situation, the Gumband-Strapi system will only return values to the SDK one level of nesting deep. For example, let’s say “CategorySets” contains many “Categories” contains many “GameTitles”. If the manifest contains a setting for “Categories”, the SDK will receive the “GameTitles” values inside of the “Categories” object in the JSON payload. However, if the manifest contains a setting for “CategorySets”, the SDK will ONLY receive the “Categories” values inside of the “CategorySets” object, and NOT the “GameTitles” values.

After creating a new content type, the API user needs to be granted access to that content type.

Click “Settings” on the left nav, then “Roles” under the “Users & Permissions Plugin” section, then the pencil icon to the right of the “Public” role

Scroll down to the “Permissions” section, expand the “Application” section, and “Select all” for all content types. Then click the green “Save” button in the top right.

Manage Entries for a Content Type

See Introduction to Content Manager

Define a Strapi Content Setting Type in the Manifest

Manifest settings can be defined as “StrapiContent” types and should take the following format:

{
   "id": "unique-manifest-id",
   "type": "StrapiContent",
   "contentType": "API-ID-from-strapi",
   "contentValue": 3, // optional
   "displayFieldName": "DisplayField",
   "display": "Strapi Content Test"
}

Description of fields:

id: A unique string (no spaces) to identify this setting against others for this exhibit
type: Always string StrapiContent when pulling content values from Strapi
contentType: The content type’s API-ID from Strapi: by convention it should be singular, or whatever the original value was entered as when creating the collection type.
contentValue: The ID value of the content item that should be the value of this setting or null
displayFieldName: The string name of the field that should be used for selection within the Gumband UI
display: The setting label for within the Gumband UI

To find the contentType for the manifest, select the content type under “Collection Types” in the left navbar and then select a n entry. Use the value next to “API ID” under the item header.

Assign Strapi Content to an Exhibit Setting

After defining a custom content type and loading content within Strapi, and then running an exhibit with a properly configured “StrapiContent” setting type in the manifest, you are ready to change that setting’s values dynamically in Gumband.

Open the exhibit UI within Gumband and navigate to the Settings tab. Find the relevant setting and select the value from the dropdown. After hitting Save, the value will update and the SDK should receive a real time notification with the value.

(A number of OscarTestType items are loaded in Strapi)

(Two StrapiContent “oscar-test-types” settings are defined in the manifest)

(Values from the Strapi content items’ “Name” field are displayed as options for the setting within the Gumband UI)

(After saving an updated setting value, the SDK receives a real time callback with the setting value)

Content Type Relationships

Strapi allows for content types to contain relationships to one another (see more in the Strapi docs). This is useful to maintain a single instance of each content type, and then share or reference those items within other content types.

When connecting these content types to Gumband, by default the Strapi API only returns nested entries one level deep. Additional business logic can be added to your Gumband-Strapi instance to be able to query more complex data structures. Talk to your Gumband representative for more details.

Content Entry Customization

Each strapi field can be configured with a unique label and description. See the video walkthrough below: