External Link Checker

About

OWSI-Core has a service called the external link checker. It’s used to check that external links stays valid.

It’s currently used in production to validate several 100k links.

It is based on the HTTPClient library. It first tries a HEAD request to limit the bandwidth usage, it tries a GET request if the HEAD request fails.

If a link is unreachable, it is marked as OFFLINE. After several checks being offline (to avoid transient errors), the link is marked as DEAD_LINK.

Model

The link must be wrapped in an ExternalLinkWrapper:

@OneToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, cascade = { CascadeType.ALL }, orphanRemoval = true)
private ExternalLinkWrapper externalLinkWrapper;

The status of the link is available in the ExternalLinkWrapper. A link is considered invalid if it’s in the DEAD_LINK status.

Usage

Maven

Starting with OWSI-Core 0.11, ExternalLinkChecker has its own Maven module:

<dependency>
    <groupId>fr.openwide.core.components</groupId>
    <artifactId>owsi-core-component-jpa-externallinkchecker</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
</dependency>

Configuration

The configuration is as follows:

externalLinkChecker.timeout=30000
externalLinkChecker.userAgent=Your user agent
externalLinkChecker.batchSize=400
externalLinkChecker.retryAttemptsNumber=4
externalLinkChecker.maxRedirects=5
externalLinkChecker.cronExpression=0 0/15 3-6,18-23 * * ?

The cron expression must be used to configure a scheduled task which launches externalLinkCheckerService.checkBatch().

You can ignore links by adding regexps using the externalLinkCheckerService.addIgnorePattern(pattern) method.

In YourAppCoreCommonConfig, you have to:

• add JpaExternalLinkCheckerBusinessPackage to the basePackageClasses of @ComponentScan

In YourAppCoreCommonJpaConfig, you have to:

• add JpaExternalLinkCheckerBusinessPackage to the package scanned for entities in applicationJpaPackageScanProvider()
• declare an Hibernate interceptor:

        @Bean
        public Interceptor hibernateInterceptor() {
                return new ChainedInterceptor()
                                .add(new ExternalLinkWrapperInterceptor());
        }