The tool I'm building needs pull data from IBM Connections Ideation Blogs. I therefore use the Connections API with basic authentication to read Blog Entries. This goes well until the description contains images. When I ask the API to provide media resources for the blog, it does not show any entries of the /BLOGS_UPLOADED_IMAGES location - the one containing images uploaded through the blog's richtext editor. The user I use in my API call is the same user who created blog entries and uploaded pictures.
However the API call DOES contain images I publish using the API and a POST request to the blog's media entry collection. This is where the next problem appears. Those Atom entries for images contain various links, one of them with a ref="enclosure", of which the API documentation (link) tells me to "Use the web address in the href attribute to obtain the binary content of the file". However, my calls to this adress are always answered with 404 response code. Another url in the Atom entry (this time of the element) is described by the same documentation (see link above) as: "Provides access the document's media. The following operation is supported: GET: Use the web address to obtain the media." When I make a call to this url, as always with basic authentication credentials attached, the response contains the html of the login form of Connections, so API authentication does not seem to be supported on this url. This is only the case for non-public communities, which require authentication, of course, if the picture is publicly availabe all works just fine.
Am I missing something out? Is there another way to retrieve the actual image from a blog's media entry through the API? Are manually uploaded pictures never contained in the media entries result or is this a bug?
It now magically works using the link with ref="enclosure" from the atom entry. I might have gotten something wrong with authentication I guess (although I'm not actually realizing what I'm doing different now than I did before).
Problem remaining: Pictures uploaded through the rich-text editor in the folder /BLOGS_UPLOADED_IMAGES do not appear in the media feed of the blog.