Interoperability: Implementing web services faster
CONTACT Elements has a powerful REST API for connecting other IT systems and accessing data in our software solutions. Now we provide new documentation that follows the OpenAPI specification. This offers benefits to customers and partners.
REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is a communication model for distributed software architectures that we have been using for years: for client-server interaction and for integrating other IT systems. REST describes the structure of programming interfaces that control access to and use of data via http requests - and is primarily the first choice for web and cloud services.
Among others, REST APIs are used to import (legacy) data, export data for reports or integrate other IT systems. Companies usually rely on the expertise of software vendors for such scenarios when they want to link in-house and third-party solutions with their applications. The reason for this is that REST defines the syntax of an API, but not its semantics. Implementing an interface requires knowledge of a software's data model and business logic.
New REST API Documentation
Now we provide a comprehensive documentation based on the OpenAPI specification for customers and partners. It provides a standardized graphical user interface that helps to intuitively understand the capabilities of our REST services and to use them faster without in-depth knowledge of our technology.
The new interface description contains the REST resources for CAD documents, parts, projects, etc. and the corresponding access methods GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. It is automatically created based on the CONTACT Elements data model. The documentation includes the most important product and project related objects as well as administrative and configuration settings, such as classification, materials, and part names.
Interactive testing
A great feature is that users can interactively test any method for any REST resource directly from the documentation at the click of a button. This makes it easy to try out whether the GET method, for example, returns the data that is wanted. Our customers are thus able to connect a web portal, middleware, or something else to our software via REST without much effort.
The description of our REST interface based on the OpenAPI specification will be provided automatically as part of the standard documentation - first in the next CONTACT Cloud release.
