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External API access

Submitted by steveb on Wed, 15/06/2022 - 10:13
in

Hey gang,

We are a business intelligence firm and one of our clients is using the OpenVMS software.

My question is, can they grant us access to the API?

We would like to pull data regularly from their API and do reporting... In the documentation I could only find reference to localhost API access - is there a front-facing API address available?

 

Thanks!

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Re: External API access

Submitted by tanderson on Wed, 15/06/2022 - 10:16.

There are no general purpose REST APIs in OpenVPMS. There is a plugin API you can use to provide your own. What sort of data are you trying to access?

Re: External API access

Submitted by steveb on Tue, 21/06/2022 - 10:42.

Thanks tanderson,

Since we will be building BI visualisations, we would hope to pull transactional details, bookings, business entity data, stock etc. Just anything we can get our hands on to help the client see what's happening with their practice.

It sounds like the current API is for bookings only.

We use a cloud based ETL tool called Matillion to pull data from API sources. It has a lot of plugins pre-built but not for OpenVMS.

Is there a plugin we could use to get the kind of data we are after? Or is there an alternate method of pulling data - say via scheduled data-dump or direct access to the database from the server? Just exploring what is available at the moment.

Cheers,

Steve

Re: External API access

Submitted by tanderson on Wed, 22/06/2022 - 15:41.

If your customer hosts OpenVPMS, you can potentially pull data from the database directly.
If you don't want to roll your own plugin to access the data, contact support[at]openvpms[dot]com who can provide consulting services to develop one.
 

Re: External API access

Submitted by steveb on Tue, 05/07/2022 - 09:54.

Hi Tim

 

Thanks for the info, it's much appreciated.

 

I believe we will have remote access to their servers. You mentioned: If your customer hosts OpenVPMS, you can potentially pull data from the database directly.

 

Would we pull directly using an odbc connection, local api, or some other method? Is this mentioned in the documentation somewhere that you could point me in the right direction?

 

Thanks again,

Steve

Re: External API access

Submitted by tanderson on Tue, 05/07/2022 - 11:41.

You've got a few options:

  • develop an OpenVPMS plugin which exposes the data you want via a REST API
  • develop an OpenVPMS plugin which pushes the data you want to an external service
  • query the underlying MySQL database directly

The first two require knowledge of the OpenVPMS plugin API. There's various plugins you can look at for examples.

 

The third requires knowledge of the OpenVPMS data model. Perhaps the easiest way to learn this is to examine the SQL in the JasperReports that query the database. These are included in the OpenVPMS release distribution under the reports directory. For the versions under source control, see https://bitbucket.org/OpenVPMS/openvpms/src/master/openvpms-release/src/...

You can find financial reports under https://bitbucket.org/OpenVPMS/openvpms/src/master/openvpms-release/src/...

 

 

 

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