Web Access - Start the journey

The aim of this document is to offer a starting point for technical staff to enable them to begin the design of an integration with ESS SIMS products and potentially access wider data from the Parent Pay Group suite of products.

The first concern is more for the commercial people, typically costs are incurred and an introduction is offered in A welcome for Technical Integrators.  Secondly things change quickly and so we would encourage all of our (Technical Integrators) TIs both present and future to keep a regular eye on Integrator Communications where we will publish any news or pertinent updates.

As is usually the case, not everything that is possible is advisable and taking a step back to design integration is always money well spent.  When data is available 24x7 on the web with even a 99.9% up time then it might be crazy to copy every bit of data that can be used on the off-chance that it is used. Equally if your application manages 'Emergency exits' then a 0.1% chance that key data is unavailable may be unacceptable. In "Thinking About Integrating" this is considered in more detail and encourages TIs to consider how to design your application for the Web, the rules are different to those for 'on-premise' applications and may required an alternative approach for best results.

In principle, coding against web APIs is straight forward but it always helps to have an example application to follow, even if it isn't quite what is needed for your application.  As such we have provided a 'Hello World' 'application' using the Postman tool which includes downloadable Postman files.   The idea being that coders can see how to get data from SIMS in a few minutes.  The larger part of the work will be exploring the APIs and something that we call 'Information Domains' which are a 'similarly purposed' group of data for an entity or subset thereof. For example:

• Learner Personal
• Staff Basic

Most of the information domains which are available are documented in a similar way to the examples above. This takes the form of example calls and the associated data classes. Most of the calls use the OData specification or a subset thereof which means that you can often filter rows and columns to meet your needs and grants.  

We also offer some c# examples which are in line with more modern coding mechanisms and basically define a data class and show how these can be serialised and de-serialised to/from the web APIs.  Formal documentation is also available for those who prefer 'Swagger' like documentation.  

All of the downloads have built in credentials to the 'Freemium' (Read only) sandbox.  As such the examples can be run directly from the downloads.  If 'Write' access is needed then TIs will need to be registered as technical integrator or a potential technical integrator and complete a request for a development environment in order to proceed.

All services are provided subject to fair usage,  as is and without warranty unless specified in formal contracts. ESS reserves the right to withdraw services outside of contract at any time to protect our systems and or reputation.