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Message-ID: <486B508C.3030501@michael-baessler.de>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:55:24 +0200
From: Michael Baessler <mba@michael-baessler.de>
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To: uima-user@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Questions about using a "customResourceSpecifier"
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Hi Christoph,

I think you mixed up two different concepts here, maybe the documentation is misleading.

So CustomResourceSpecifiers are mainly intended to be used if you want to create your own new UIMA
Resource in the sense of a UIMA component. So for example you may know that we have different UIMA
remote service protocols (SOAP, Vinci). If you now want to create a new service protocol based on
your own implementation you can implement that using the CustomResourceSpecifier approach. When
integrating this resource/component the UIMA framework can treat this similar to an analysis engine.
Such resource an for example be plugged in as delegate to an aggregate analysis engine.

I don't think that CustomResourceSpecifier can be integrated as externalResource to an analysis
engine. You may check the documentation for externalResoruces with a short example here:
http://incubator.apache.org/uima/downloads/releaseDocs/2.2.2-incubating/docs/html/tutorials_and_users_guides/tutorials_and_users_guides.html#ugr.tug.aae.accessing_external_resource_files
I think that what you are trying to do.

Another example for externalResources is available in the Tagger annotator in the Sandbox. This
annotator use an external resource for the model file (ModelResource).

Hope that helps.

-- Michael

Christoph Büscher wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a few questions about binding to external resources that are no
> file resources. The documentation mentions the option to use a
> "customResourceSpecifier" as described in
> 
> http://incubator.apache.org/uima/downloads/releaseDocs/2.2.2-incubating/docs/html/references/references.html#ugr.ref.xml.component_descriptor.custom_resource_specifiers
> 
> 
> I would like to use the resource mechanism to bind to an interface for
> read access to a database. The database connection parameters would be
> parameters in the "customResourceSpecifier".
> 
> I have a few questions concerning this.
> 
> 1. How do I include a custom resource specifier in e.g. a CPEs resource
> binding? It's not exactly clear to me from the documentation, but I
> would try something like:
> 
> <externalResource>
>       <name>MyDBResource</name>
>       <description>a resource that provides read access to a
> database</description>
>       <customResourceSpecifier>
>       pathToCustomresourceSpecifier/myCustomResourceSpecifier.xml
>       </customResourceSpecifier>
> </externalResource>
>     
> Can I find examples for the correct syntax here somewhere in the
> documentation?
> 
> 2. The documentation mentions the implementation class must implement
> the "Resource" interface. Is there any existing implementation of
> "Resource" that is safe to extend to use in an external resource binding?
> 
> 
> Also, if I'm completely on the wrong track with this approach to share
> read connection to a database for differen TAEs/readers please let me
> know :-)
>