Sling Pipes

Sling pipes is a tool set for doing extract - transform - load operations by chaining proven code blocks.

Introduction

Sling Pipes can be seen as a language that takes profit of optimized communication between two developers knowing sling terminology, e.g.

    searching for resources with type "foo/bar" and setting property id to 3

Such sentence with that limited amount of words is enough between two sling developers to understand fully what it is doing. However, implementing that change with a computer language directly will take much more words, risks of failure, complexity of deployement and would be more opaque, not talking about monitoring or execution commons, but complex features you'd like to add.

With Sling Pipes, what you need to develop, and what is readable by another developer is

    plumber.newPipe(resolver).echo("content").$("foo/bar").write("id",3).build("/etc/demo")

this is enough to persist a pipe in /etc/demo that is executable as http, java, groovy console script, or JMX. You can monitor it with JMX, logs, http, you'll have dry run possibility of that execution for example, or asynchronous execution. If it's a one-off execution, and you can access a groovy script or anything you can use external command line tool like pipe to run

    pipe "echo /content | $ foo/bar | write id=3"  

Those examples are using echo, find and write subpipes.

You could also use a pipe to create a java-free json or csv servlet, or a list component whose list possibilities are pipes accessed through the PipeModel you can check some introductions at different adaptTo presentations:

AdaptTo introductions

some presentations were made at the adaptTo conference, last three were: latest presentation at a 2021 lightning talk. This introduces the change of being able to manipulate pipes through command line.

General introduction at a 2017 lightning talk.

and latest news at a 2018 lightning talk

Get Started

You can either use it with adobe's scripts or just configure and execute a pipe with java, groovy console, http, or jmx

To get more familiar with pipes go through the 3 families of pipes to consider and the samples detailed:

• reader pipes, that will just output a set of resource depending on the input, without modifying anything,
• writer pipes, that modify the repository, depending on configuration and input,
• logical pipes, that refer to other pipes, chaining them or using their results in a general way

Once you've successfully run your first try, you can get into more complicated configuration, making them dynamics with bindings and have a look at some other samples

Compatibility

For running this tool on a sling instance you need:

• java 8 (Nashorn is used for expression) for version < 4.0.0, for 4.0.0+ you are good with upper java versions
• slingQuery (3.0.0) (used in SlingQueryPipe)
• jackrabbit api (2.7.5+) (used in AuthorizablePipe)