Webservice Cookbook - Introduction

These cookbook articles provide step-by-step descriptions to work with several prevalent webservice or REST APIs.

These take you through the setup tasks needed to connect and exchange data with a webservice effectively, through to Reading and Writing data to a REST based webservice.

The cookbook uses references four webservices:

  • Shopify
    • Each of the articles use the Shopify (an eCommerce solution) API. We've used this as a reference since the Shopify API is very well implemented, with clear examples/documentation.

      To work through the examples in the webservices cookbook we recommend you create a trial Shopify account.

  • JIRA
    • A software and issue tracking solution.
  • Mailchimp
    • A marketing automation (email) platform.
  • Pepperi
    • A mobile sales solution.

Articles

The examples should be worked through in order.

  • Basic Authentication
    • The first step when integrating with a webservice is to work out the means to authenticate with the service.
    • This article describes how to setup Basic Authentication against several webservices weaving in references to the vendor's documentation.
  • OAUTH 2.0 Authentication
    • The other authentication protocol IMan supports is OAuth 2.0.
    • This article describes how to setup OAuth 2.0 Authentication against several via prevalent webservices. Again this document incorporates the vendor's documentation to illustrate how to use various setup fields.
    • This article doesn't necessarily need to be completed.
  • Webservice Behaviour
    • The Webservice Behaviour groups general behaviours such as Authentication, Paging, Request Throttling and Tracing. Almost every service will need a Webservice Behaviour, as it allows you to associate an authentication method with a request.
    • This article shows how to setup the webservice behaviours against the three webservices.
  • Reading Data from Shopify - JSON Reader
    • This article steps through setting up a JSON Reader to read orders from Shopify.
  • Using the Stepped Reader
    • Stepped Readers allow you to make several requests to a service to generate a single dataset. I.e. A first call to obtain a list of transactions and subsequent calls to obtain details of each transaction.
    • This article shows how to setup a STEPPED JSON Reader, again using Orders from Shopify as the input.
  • Webservice Lookup
    • Learn how use the Webservice Lookups function to be able to perform lookups/translations/validation logic against a webservice within any integration.
  • JSON Writer - Flat Data
    • Learn how to write to the Shopify API to both create/insert customer records and modify existing customer records.
    • The article explains how to configure the JSON Writer for both operations and some general Webservice concepts.
  • Replaying Response Data
    • This article explains how to write (or use) the response from a webservice back onto the IMan dataset.
    • Specifically this article explains how we can obtain the auto-generated id's when customer records are created in Shopify.