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Web Access - Technical Intro

Introduction

This document explains to technical staff how to begin the design of a web-based integration with ESS SIMS products. While web access to school data held in SIMS is growing rapidly, it is not as comprehensive yet as the on-premise options. 

If the web API coverage needed by your application exists then 'web' is likely to be the best route. At the time of writing, however, 95%+ of integrations are only available via the on-premise route. 

Before you start

Before starting, please give some thought to how frequently your application needs to copy data from SIMS. For many applications, it will not be necessary to update data constantly. "Thinking About Integrating" explains this in more detail and encourages technical integrators ("TIs") to consider how to design their application for the web. The rules are different to those for 'on-premise' applications and a web-based integration may require an alternative approach for best results.

Get Data from a SIMS system in 15 Minutes

To show you how to get data from SIMS in a few minutes, we have provided a 'Hello World' 'application' using the Postman tool which includes downloadable Postman files.  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:

Most of the information domains 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.  

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.  

Sandbox is Free to Use

All of the downloads have built-in credentials to the 'Freemium' (read-only) sandbox which will support many of the read-only calls. This enables the examples to be run directly from the downloads.  If 'Write' or further access is needed then TIs will need to be registered as a technical integrator or a potential technical integrator and complete a request for a development environment which would incur work on our side and attract associated charges to the TI.

If you would like an idea of possible cost, we offer an introduction in A welcome for Technical Integrators.  We also encourage all of our (Technical Integrators) TIs both present and future to keep a regular eye on our TI  'News' where we publish any news or pertinent updates.

Feedback

Please feel free to tell us what you think and submit requests for further APIs.  ESS will use these to help with the prioritisation of work.  Importantly, the set of calls listed in 'Example Calls'  is the most up to date list of the APIs available for SIMS 7 integration; whilst this is (and will remain) work in progress, if the list contains what you need then you should be good to go...  

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.