OpenDMA Haystack

Integrate Haystack with Enterprise Content Management systems such as Alfresco, CMOD, Documentum, FileNet P8, OnBase, SharePoint, and other platforms.

OpenDMA is a vendor-neutral abstraction layer for Enterprise Content Management. It provides a common API for repositories allowing developers to build applications that access content stored on different platforms, including federating across multiple repositories.

This package connects that API to Haystack with components to retrieve and fetch OpenDMA documents as part of pipelines.

A convenient Toolset allows agentic applications to browse through complex repository layouts to retrieve information.

See our examples and tutorials to learn how to build RAG pipelines and tool-calling agents.

Features

• Tools to browse an ECM repository, e.g. to enable agents to discover relevant documents.
• Tools for reading text chunks of documents, e.g. to allow agents to read sections of documents.
• Fetch binary content streams by document ID or folder ID, e.g. to build a knowledge base.
• Search repositories with metadata-only Haystack retrievers, e.g. to use an existing repository as knowledge base.
• Preserve full metadata on every Haystack ByteStream and Document, e.g. to scope RAG retrieval to a subset of relevant items.

Installation

Install OpenDMA and this integration from PyPI:

pip install opendma-haystack

Install the optional examples dependencies when using the documented converter pipelines for PDF, HTML, or Microsoft Office formats:

pip install "opendma-haystack[examples]"

Quickstart

from opendma_haystack import OpenDMAFetcher

fetcher = OpenDMAFetcher(
    endpoint="http://localhost:8080/opendma",
    username="admin",
    password="admin",
    repository_id="my-repository",
)

result = fetcher.run(targets=["some-document-id"])
streams = result["streams"]

for stream in streams:
    print(stream.meta.get("opendma_id"))
    print(stream.meta.get("opendma:Title"))
    print(stream.mime_type)
    print(len(stream.data))

OpenDMAFetcher returns Haystack ByteStream objects. Connect it to Haystack converters such as TextFileToDocument, PyPDFToDocument, HTMLToDocument, or DoclingConverter when you need text Document objects for indexing or RAG.

Use OpenDMARetriever when you want to search in an ECM system via OpenDMA:

from opendma_haystack import OpenDMARetriever

retriever = OpenDMARetriever(
    endpoint="http://localhost:8080/opendma",
    username="admin",
    password="admin",
    repository_id="Alfresco",
    query_language="opendma:sfts",
)

result = retriever.run(query="needle keyword")
documents = result["documents"]

Retriever results are metadata-only locator Document objects. They identify matching repository documents and can be passed to OpenDMAFetcher to fetch the actual content.

The OpenDMAToolset provides various tools to allow agents to browse repository layouts and read sections of text documents:

from opendma_haystack import OpenDMAToolset
from haystack.components.agents import Agent
from haystack.components.generators.chat import OpenAIChatGenerator
from haystack.utils import Secret
from haystack.dataclasses import ChatMessage

toolset = OpenDMAToolset(
    endpoint="http://localhost:8080/opendma",
    username="ignored",
    password="ignored",
    repository_id="sample-repo",
)

agent = Agent(
    chat_generator=OpenAIChatGenerator(
        api_key=Secret.from_env_var("OPENAI_API_KEY"),
        model="gpt-4o-mini",
    ),
    tools=toolset,
    system_prompt="You are...",
)

result = agent.run(messages=[ChatMessage.from_user(
  "Where can I find the latest meeting notes of project orion?")])

print(result.get("last_message").text)

Documentation

• Tutorials: guided Haystack application tutorials
• Documentation: component usage, fetcher options, and retriever behavior
• Examples: runnable examples using the tutorial repository

Development

This project uses uv for dependency management.

uv sync --all-extras
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check src tests
uv run mypy -p opendma_haystack
uv run mypy --follow-imports=skip tests

Related Projects

• Haystack
• OpenDMA
• opendma-api
• opendma-remote