Register Data Assets

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1 Introduction

All shareable entities can be registered in the Data Hub Catalog by exposing them in an OData service. The registration includes the following:

  • Location – where the data can be accessed
  • Structural metadata – what the data looks like
  • Descriptive metadata – information that indicates the applicability of using the asset for a particular app

For Mendix apps, there is a deployment pipeline which registers OData v3 published services for entities that are to be exposed in an OData service. This means that in Studio Pro, upon deployment of an app (via Run), the OData v3 services are automatically registered in the Data Hub Catalog. For further information on deployment on the Mendix Platform, see Deployment in the Developer Portal Guide.

For non-Mendix apps (for example, from third-party public REST APIs), entities can be included in an OData v4 service and this can be manually registered through the service registering process.

This section starts with guidelines and best practice for registering services and shared entities in the Data Hub Catalog. The steps for registering an OData Service from Studio Pro are described in Publishing an OData Service in Studio Pro to Register Entities section below.

The steps for updating a consumed OData service in Studio Pro for which a new version is available are described in the Updating a Published OData Service in Studio Pro section below.

2 Best Practices for Registering Services and Shared Datasets

This section provides advice and best practices when registering your services in the Data Hub Catalog either from Studio Pro or through manual registration.

2.1 Data Sharing Policy

App owners should refer to their Data Hub Admin and Data Hub Curator to align with their organization’s data registration policy and methods. This can include naming and grouping the entities that define specific data, access and security, and also issuing new versions of services.

Some datasets may be published in several OData services as a way of grouping and publishing sets of data. Updating and maintenance has to be managed and maintained by the app owners.

User access rights to the dataset (or entity set) and the associated data are published in the OData service and this is applied to the datasets that are consumed in an app. For details on security in Studio Pro, see Security in the Studio Pro Guide.

2.2 OData Services and Versions

Services that are updated should be clearly documented and version numbers maintained and registered.

It is a good practice to adopt a strict convention for versioning. For example, any revisions or changes made to a service that is deployed to the same location could be indicated using a semantic numbering convention and communicated to all apps consuming the service. This means that major version numbers are assigned for significant changes to the service (for example, removing entities or attributes, or requiring input parameters that would be incompatible for the consuming apps and would result in a break or failure). You can assign minor version numbers for revisions that will “not break” consuming apps (for example, when adding new fields to the service or adding new operations), for which the clients will continue to work.

It is also good practice to expose major revisions to a new service. If the publisher wants to drop support for the old service, it can be deprecated, with a grace period for consumers to transfer to the replacement service and eventually remove it when there are no more connections to the old service. The consequences of changing the properties of a service with the same version when the service is being consumed by other apps is that the apps will break.

You should ensure that all apps that consume entities are notified when there is a change to a service or entity.

2.3 Environments

The environment that an app is deployed to is important and indicates the location of the data for the app. The OData service for this deployment of the app is also located in the same environment and provides the connection to the data by consuming apps. Apps sharing data have to be deployed to a reliable production environment where the data for the apps is stable and reliably maintained.

When apps are being developed, ensure that there is a representative set of data available in the test or development environments so that services can be properly tested in the consuming apps. For example, in the case of an app for Human Resources, the developer should have test data with the different access levels to ensure that the correct data is available to users of differing access levels.

2.4 Entities and Associations

Currently only persistable entities can be exposed for sharing by another app. The data associated with the entity is used in the consuming app.

When selecting the entities to expose in a service, consider including associated entities so that the relationship between the data is also registered.

When exposing Mendix entities that are generalizations and specializations in the same service the specialized entities will be defined in the published OData servcie as discrete entities which include the inherited attributes and associations. The inheritance relationship will not be present in the metadata contract, and also not when the entities are consumed in Mendix Studio Pro.

3 Publishing an OData Service in Studio Pro

This section describes how to register entities from your Mendix app in the Data Hub Catalog in Studio Pro. For details on publishing an OData resource, see Published OData Resource in the Studio Pro Guide.

  1. In the domain model, right-click the entity to be exposed and from the menu select Expose as OData resource:

  2. In the Select Published OData Service dialog box, select the folder in the module that you want to use to organize your APIs, and click New to add a new OData service to that folder:

  3. Enter a meaningful name that indicates the entities and data that are going to be exposed for the published OData service and click OK.

  4. The OData service document is added to the module, and the Edit published resource dialog box is displayed for the selected entity. The information in this will form the metadata definition for the entity:

  • Entity – the name and module of the entity
    • Select – click to display list of entities available in the module and select another entity to expose
    • Show – click to see the entity in the domain model
  • Exposed attributes and associations – click select to view and select the attributes and associations to expose for this entity
  • Exposed entity name – you can customize the name of the entity in the OData service
  • Exposed set name – the name of the dataset associated with the entity that is exposed
  • Example of location – the location of the dataset for the entity
  • Use paging – the maximum number of data objects that are retrieved in a single call (with a link to the next set)
  • Public documentation tab – a summary and a description of the entity can be added here

For further details, see Published OData Resource in the Studio Pro Guide.

  1. Click OK to see the OData Service page. If you want to publish several entities in the same service, add them here by clicking Add for the Resources.

  2. If you add an entity that is associated with another entity that is exposed in the same OData service, you will be asked whether you want to include the association in the service definition. Click Yes and the association between the two entities will be included under Attributes and associations.

In the example illustrated below, you will see that for Entity_2 under Attributes and associations there is currently 0 association.

When Entity_3 is added to the service which has an association to Entity_2, you will see that Entity_3 has listed that it has 1 association and there is a further prompt Would you like to publish the other side of this association as well with the name of the association showing the entities being connected.

Click Yes and the association for Entity-2 is now updated to 1 association:

  1. Add a Summary and Description of the service In the Properties pane:

  2. When the app is deployed with Run, the OData services defined for the app will automatically be registered in the Data Hub Catalog.

4 OData Service Screen

The OData service screen contains all the details that will be included in the OData service contract or $metadata file that will be registered in the Data Hub Catalog. Entities can be added and removed and changes to attributes and associations for included entities can also be made in this document.

4.1 General Tab

The General tab contains all the details for the published metadata and the details of the entitites that will be exposed in the service as follows:

  • Service Name – the name of the service
  • Version – the version of the service
  • Location – the URL of the service metadata
  • Namespace – the namespace or uniform resource identifier (URI) for the service (for further details, see Namespace)

  • Resources – the entities that are included in the service:

    • Add, Edit, Delete – click to add, edit, or remove an entity from the OData Service, respectively

    • Show – click to see the entity in the domain model

    • Attributes and associations – this column shows the attributes and association for the selected entity

  • Change – click this to display the Select Attributes and associations dialog box for the selected entity:

    You can specify which attributes you want to include for the service, customize the Exposed names of the attributes and associations for the OData service.

For further details, see Published OData Resource.

4.2 Settings Tab

In the Settings tab, you can set configurations of associations between entities, the export location of the service, and the metadata file. You can also specify access to the entities exposed:

4.2.1 Configuration

For Associations, select As a link for your published OData service to ensure that the association between entities is exposed.

4.2.2 Export

This section contains the following properties:

  • Service feed – displays the service endpoint; click Export to create an export file of the service feed
  • Metadata – displays the OData service contract file; click Export to create an export file of the service contract

4.2.3 Security

This section will be displayed if project security is enabled. For further details, see the Security section of Published OData Services.

This section contains the following properties:

  • Requires authentication– specify if the consuming apps have to authenticate access to the data associated to the exposed entities
    • Yes will require the specified authentication
    • No means for no restriction to access to the data

  • Authentication methods – one or more of the following authentication methods can be checked:

    • Username and password – for “basic authentication” with a username and a password
    • Active session – for access to the data within the current app session
    • Custom – to specify custom authentication using a microflow that is called every time a user wants to access the data to an entity

  • Microflow – when Custom authentication is checked, specify the authentication microflow that will be used

  • Allowed roles – refers to the module roles that a user must have to access the consumed entity

5 Deployment Environments

The OData service that is created when an app is deployed will be associated with the environment that the app is deployed to. This will also be the link to the data set associated with the exposed entities.

When sharing entities through an OData service for use in other apps, it is important that the app is deployed to a stable environment so that the data for the app is maintained in this environment. Usually this will be a production environment.

6 Updating a Published OData Service in Studio Pro

For guidelines on when to update a published OData service and when to publish a new one, see the OData Services and Version section above.

Registered OData services for Mendix apps can be updated in Studio Pro in the OData service document. You can access the OData Service page rom the Project Explorer in Studio Pro by double-clicking the published OData service document to be updated.

To update a published OData service, follow these steps:

  1. Create a duplicate of the old service document to make your changes to by right-clicking in Project Explorer the OData service that you want to update and then clicking Duplicate. A copy of the service will be created. You can rename the new service by right-clicking and selecting Rename.
  2. Double-click this service to open the service document. You can now make the changes to the service.
  3. Indicate the level of the change to the service by changing the version number. We recommend that you follow semantic numbering to indicate the severity of the change. If you are making updates that would not break consuming apps, then the version number can be incremented after the decimal point. A major update that may break consuming apps would be indicated by an incremental increase in the integer.
  4. For a major update to the service, change the Location where the service will be deployed to, the service endpoint, to ensure that consuming apps will not be affected. Minor updates can be deployed to the same endpoint.
  5. Change the Description (in the Properties pane) of the service to describe to all users the changes that have been made to the service.
  6. Make the changes to the service, taking care when removing entities, attributes, and associations. The guideline is removing exposed entities, attributes and association from a published service, this would have to be a major service update that is deployed to a different endpoint.
  7. Deploy the app to register the services in the Data Hub Catalog. If you have specified a different endpoint for the new service version, both versions of the service will now be registered.
  8. In the Data Hub Catalog, curate the new service and add tags and further descriptions as necessary.
  9. Inform consuming apps of the changes. You can see all apps that are consuming previous versions of the service in the Data Hub Catalog and also the visual network of dependencies in the Data Hub Landscape. Use the Business Owner and Technical Owner links to make contact with the users.
  10. For major changes, and when a new service is published that will replace an existing one, provide deprecation notices to all consuming apps if they have to change to the new version within a certain length of time if the previous version is going to become inactive.
  11. It is good practice to remove old (unused services) from your app by deleting them in the Project Explorer only when you are sure that they are no longer being consumed by any other apps. You can verify this by looking in Mendix Data Hub and searching for the service in the Catalog or checking out the network of dependencies in Data Hub Landscape.

7 Manually Registering OData V4 Services

OData v4 services that are published from Mendix apps which are not hosted in the Mendix Cloud are not automatically registered in the Data Hub Catalog through the deployment pipeline. For example, if you have an app running on-premises or anywhere else outside the Mendix Cloud, there will not be any auto-registration. These services can be manually registered in the catalog.

During manual registration, you can enter additional information about the service (such as a description) and assign tags to categorize the service so that it can be found for specific uses.

This section describes the sequence of steps to manually register a service in the Data Hub Catalog.

7.1 Preparing the v4 OData Service Documents

The files for an OData v4 service contract may comprise the base schema definition and additional associated schema documents to complete the full service definition. The files formats of the v4 OData Service contracts that are accepted are .xml (for a single file) and .zip (when the contract includes several files).

7.2 Registering the Service – Application and Environment

To register the service, follow these steps:

  1. On the Data Hub screen, click Register new service to display the Application and Environment Form.

    Data Hub screen

  2. Enter the details of the app from which the OData v4 service was issued. This information will be displayed in the Service Details in the Data Hub Catalog and provide the link to the app.

  3. Specify the details of the Application:

    • Use Existing Application
      • Yes – click this if the app is already registered in the Data Hub Catalog (for example, when you are registering a new service for a previously registered app, or when you are registering a new version of an existing service)
      • No – click this when registering a new app that is not currently registered in the Catalog
    • UUID – paste the UUID here for an existing app registered in the Data Hub Catalog (for a new app, the UUID is automatically generated)
      • You can copy the UUID of an already registered app from Settings > General in the Developer Porta
      • For further information on deep links for an app, see How to Manage Deep Links.
    • Name – enter the name of the application as it should appear in the details page of the service
    • Business Owner – enter the name of the business owner of the data that is made available through the service

  4. Enter the Environment details of the deployed app:

    • Use Existing Environment
      • Yes – click this when the deployed app in an existing environment is already registered in the Data Hub Catalog (for example, when you are registering a new service for the app deployed to this environment, or when you are registering a new version of an existing service deployed to this environment)
      • No – click this for a new deployment to an environment
    • UUID
      • For an existing app registered in the Data Hub Catalog to this environment, paste the UUID here
      • If you clicked No above for Use Existing Environment, the enviroment UUID is automatically generated
    • Name – enter the name of the environment as it will be rendered in the catalog
    • Location – enter the URL of the environment location

  5. Click Next Step to proceed to the Upload contract form.

7.3 Uploading the OData Contract and Selecting Main Schema

You will now select and upload the OData contract and select the schema.

  1. Browse and upload the .zip file of the OData v4 service you want to register and click Validate zip file.

  2. The file will be validated, and the OData schemas that are available will be listed:

  3. You can examine the schemas by clicking + to display the schema:

  4. Select the primary schema from the list that defines the service by checking the box.

  5. Click Next Step to proceed to the Service Details form.

7.4 Entering Further Service Details

In the final step of the manual registration process, use the Service Details screen to specify further details that will be displayed in Service metadata pane:

  1. In Service Name, enter the name of the OData service.

  2. In Service Version, enter the version number for the service.

  3. In Relative service location, enter the relative URL for the service.

  4. In Service Description, enter a description of the service that will be displayed in the Search Details and also used in the catalog search.

  5. In Tags, enter tags that can be used to categorize registered services and thus make them discoverable for specific uses. Add tags by entering alphanumeric strings separated by spaces. To remove a tag, click the x.

  6. When all the information has been completed, click Save your service.

  7. The contracts will be interpreted and the service registered in the Data Hub Catalog. On successful registration, you will be informed:

The service is now registered in the Data Hub Catalog.

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