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External access to Data Lake APIs

Business Problem

API access is vital for managing access to services in a cloud environment. Organizations looking to leverage the Data Fabric API suite to programmatically query and retrieve datasets from the Infor Data Lake can do so through any number of available tools and development platforms.

Postman is an example of a platform that facilitates testing and scripting around APIs.

Note: The Data Fabric Compass API is an asynchronous API endpoint. It allows authenticated users to make requests and receive responses through two distinct calls, without having to wait for the server to finish processing all of the data.

Components

Requirements

  • Access to an Infor CloudSuite
  • ION API Gateway (IONAPI-Administrator)
  • Postman desktop application
  • Optional Campus classes:
    • Infor OS: Foundation for Multi-Tenant – Part 1
    • Infor OS: Foundation for Multi-Tenant – Part 2
    • Infor OS: Configuring and Administering ION API

Tutorial

This tutorial covers the necessary steps in setting up and testing the Data Fabric Compass APIs within Postman.

  1. Download and install Postman.
  2. Create an authorized app in ION API gateway and download the credentials (detailed instructions).
  3. The following video provides an overview of the Data Fabric Compass APIs, and walks though the process of creating an authorized app in ION API, exporting the generated credentials for use with Postman, and finally how you can create and manage Compass queries directly within Postman.
Full tutorial on how to test external API access with Postman

Best Practices

You should select an optimal size for downloading query results based on hardware constraints and network timeouts. This will also allow you to re-retrieve a portion of the result in the event of a connection failure. Keep in mind that the result of a query is static, and does not change when data is added or updated in the Data Lake. The page size is based on rows, with a maximum limit of 100,000 rows with a 10 MB size limit. The version 2 Compass APIs functionality uses OFFSET and LIMIT parameters for the result set retrieved. Query results are usually available for roughly 20 hours after receiving the FINISHED status.

You can learn more about the Compass API paging feature in this walkthrough:

Note: The API section includes a documented listing of the Data Fabric Compass API that you can interact with and test on this platform.