In this article I would like to present the RESTForms project - generic REST API backend for modern web applications.

The idea behind the project is simple -after I wrote several REST APIs I realized that generally, REST API consists of two parts:

  • Work with persistent classes
  • Custom business logic

And, while you'll have to write your own custom business logic, RESTForms provides all things related to working with persistent classes right out of the box.
Use cases

  • You already have a data model in Caché and you want to expose some (or all) of the information in a form of REST API
  • You are developing a new Caché application and you want to provide a REST API
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We tested REST Services as described for Caché DocServer example and for requests using http protocol it works without problems. However when we use the https protocol for the same REST Service it is not available. Our infrastructure is as follows: Apache with openssl, which works on the other hand well for CSP with https. If we switch on the web gateway http trace facility we could see the request of CSP pages by https://... but again a request of a REST Service by https:// will not result in a entry in the tracer. We hope that this description of the problem is understandable.

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Question
· Nov 7, 2016
Binary Support in JSON?

I'm working on a REST service which will include a binary stream as a request property. I'm currently encoding the stream as BASE64 and passing it as a string value, but I was wondering if there is anything in the Caché JSON support that may be a better fit for encoding this data? Thanks Chris

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Hi everybody,

I created my own REST service class by extending EnsLib.REST.Service.

In some particular conditions of the parameters of the request, the REST service should respond to the client with an HTTP status response code 400 "Bad request".

I read the article "RESTful Exception Handling " and I try to use the suggested:

do ..ReportHttpStatusCode(400)

But the server seems ignore it and get back to client the 500 http response code.

Any suggestions?

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This is a beginner’s guide to the design of a “MicroService” implemented in Ensemble. “MicroService” is a popular phrase these days which has a broad interpretation. My interpretation is: “MicroService” is a “NoSQL Service”. A what? The answer is in the article.

We learnt what the difference is between SQL and NoSQL databases. For me the difference is nearly the same between a SOA Web Service and a “MicroService”. I am going to explain it through an example.

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Article
· Oct 12, 2016 12m read
RESTful API

Beginner’s guide to RESTful Application Program Interface (API) design and documentation. Through the example you will learn some common pattern for RESTful API.

Before you read

You need to know

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Article
· Oct 7, 2016 4m read
Forwarding Requests in a REST Service

One useful feature of our REST framework is the ability for a dispatch class to identify request prefixes and forward them to another dispatch class. This approach of modularizing your URL map will improve code readability, enable you to easily maintain separate versions of an interface, and provide a means to protect API calls that only certain users will be allowed to access.

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Article
· Oct 6, 2016 4m read
RESTful Exception Handling

A beginner’s guide to Exception Handling in RESTful web services. The article gives an example how the various error conditions during processing a service request can be handled.

We expect our client – server communication working in a flawless operational condition, running error free software. But we are prepared to handle exceptions. Are we? So far in the examples of the previous sessions were not. We did not care about exceptions. The result? In any error incident it took ages to figure out what the problem is and more importantly how to fix it.

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Article
· Oct 5, 2016 13m read
RESTful way of data transfer

This article gives a brief introduction how a RESTful service consumer and a RESTful service provider exchange data. It is a beginner’s guide. Data is transferred from a consumer to a provider as parameters of the service. Parameters are part of a service request. The result of the service action a response is returned from a provider to a consumer. Both the service request and response are standard HTTP messages. Since HTTP is a flexible standard regarding to the message contents, RESTful services also enjoy the versatility of data transfer methods.

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Hi all,

We're creating a series of RESTful APIs that output data from a Cache database (made up of global storage that we've mapped to classes). I'm running into some problems with object-to-JSON conversions when relationships are involved. Eg:

ParentClass has children relationship to ChildClass

ChildClass has parent relationship to ParentClass

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Cross-origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is one of the basic security features built into browsers. CORS controls accessing resources from a HTML page in domains other than the original domain. It is particularly important for AJAX calls. Since RESTful services can be used as data provider to any AJAX call, you have to be able to control cross-origin access. By default services are not allowed to do CORS. You are going to learn how to enable it for Ensemble RESTful services.

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Article
· Sep 23, 2016 6m read
Creating a RESTful Service using Ensemble

This is a detailed guide to develop RESTful services using InterSystems Ensemble. The goal of this guide is to make you understanding the basic concept and building blocks of a RESTful service. The service is going to provide a very basic functionality (a “Hello world!”).

You will learn how to create required components as Ensemble classes, configure the run-time as an Ensemble Production and create a service configuration as a web application.

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Article
· Sep 21, 2016 7m read
REST in Pieces

A beginners guide to develop Ensemble RESTful web services.

Background

Before you start reading this short introduction please go through the on-line documentation of Ensemble with special attention to chapter “Creating REST services and clients with Ensemble”.

The approach in the documentation is undisputable the fastest and easiest way to create RESTful services. As a beginner I went through the documentation and I had several questions. This short article is listing those questions plus my humble answers.

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Question
· Sep 19, 2016
REST json payload

Hi-

This almost seems like a silly question, but I am new to REST services.

I have a rest service that has a method for adding records to my database.

<Route Url="/userdetails" Method="POST" Call="SaveUserDetails"/>

My REST client sends data using json in the body of the request. I have verified using debugging tools that the data is actually being sent.

On the server side in my SaveUserDetails method where do I find the json?

What is the proper way to serialize that json into an object?

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Do you have any experience / recommendations / best practice on how to update server-side data residing in a Cache database via a REST service?

A naïve approach would be to send a full JSON representation of the data object via an http POST to a method on a REST handler class:

<Route Url="/mydata/:id" Method="POST" Call="Update"/>

The problem I see here is, if only one of the data object's properties has changed, how do we know which? Or do we simply overwrite all properties?

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Some time ago, I was started to work at a new company even in other country, and more important in a different sphere when I have not been worked before, in HealthCare. It's a very new project even for company. Since I have not experience in HealthCare, I looked at what I can use in my project, and found that I should not reinvent the bicycle, and think about how to store all my data which I need and how to get access to this data. And I can use FHIR, which is looks like everything what I need, what else I need it's just a client.

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Article
· Sep 2, 2016 2m read
Advanced URL mapping for REST

By now it's a commonplace how to implement a basic REST API in Caché and there is good documentation about it here: REST in Caché

A question that comes up from time to time is:

How can I make a parameter in my REST url optional?

Simply put, is it possible to create a URL map in Caché that maps a URL like this:

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Hi,

We are trying to implement a client side data provider as a component (ZEN) that will use JQuery to do rest calls to a desired URL, in this case, a %CSP.Rest service implemented by ourselves.

This component will be used within our application that is authenticated with a correct user configured on Caché management portal and therefore using one license unit. As we are using a Ajax call from client side this connection creates a new session that will use a new license.

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I cant find any description on how to read custom http request headers in a REST service.

On some occations i want to read http headers passed along when customers uses our REST API or headers added by the CND provider. Does anyone know how to read these http headers?

For example:
cloudflair.com sends a vistors country information along to the server using a customer http header called "CF-IPCountry". We would like to read this information and use it for statistics.

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Hi,

I want to create a table with a dynamic display of data using the DataGrid.

On the page there dataCombo and the table.

According to the plan, when the user selects an item in dataCombo the table is filled with data. If select another item - data is updated.

But in fact, the data in the table are loaded once when the page is loaded, and when I select value in DataCombo, I receive an error:

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Today I'm releasing a new EWD 3 module - ewd-feder8.

ewd-feder8 is a federation or integration platform, built as an extension of the EWD 3 ewd-xpress module. So what does it do and what's it for?

It's all about federating and integrating multiple web or REST service end-points.

At its simplest you can use it as a proxy server in front of a remote web service or REST end-point.

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In this article I'll describe how to set up web services and/or REST services using EWD 3.

Since EWD 3 is designed to be modular, you can construct the environment that exactly meets your needs, but for much of the time you'll probably find that the pre-built EWD 3 ewd-xpress super-module does most of what you need because it hooks together all the core EWD 3 and other building-blocks you'll need:

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