The main purpose of Direct Access URLs (or DAUs) is to accelerate the local download of content by allowing you to have direct content URLs for your binary content that can help with distributed content repositories in customer environments, and cloud deployments.
Azure Blob Storage provide Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens, which as a part of the object's URL can be used for sharing objects. This feature is a perfect candidate for implementing direct access to your content.
Note
The Azure SAS tokens are temporary with an expiration time.
The Alfresco repository infrastructure now supports direct access URLs. This includes the ContentService and the
ContentStore interface for which default methods have been provided so that ContentStore implementations for older
versions of this interface throw a Not Supported exception. The new methods are auditable using the node reference and
time (in seconds) for which the DAU is valid as the parameters.
ReST API endpoints can be used for requesting a new Direct Access URL (i.e. a direct download link) for a specific file in the content repository.
The access to direct access URLs is strictly controlled. Their expiration date is set/restricted by configurations in the repository using global and content store specific properties.
- Values in the content store properties, default expiry time and maximum expiry time, are used in preference to the system-wide properties, if valid.
- If invalid, an attempt is made to default to the system-wide properties.
- However, if that still doesn't result in a valid configuration, the DAUs for that specific content store are disabled.