How Progress Autonomous REST Connector Bridges the Gap Between BI Tools and Internal Applications

Original article published in external trade publication, SD Times.

In an increasingly interconnected business world, being able to connect business intelligence (BI) tools to internal applications or data sources is a must. Fortunately, much of the industry has standardized around REST APIs, which provides a starting point for making these connections, but it’s not a perfect system as it stands today.

Progress Principal Sales Engineer, Dennis Bennett said “Pretty much every SaaS application will expose a REST API to give you access to it. Since [these applications are] hosted in the cloud, they’re never going to give you access to the database that holds your data because that’s just way too insecure, but they can give you access through an API so that you can make a request to get your data and it will go through some logic to ensure what you’re asking for is something you’re entitled to.”

He explained that the downside to REST APIs is that they don’t lock you down into any specific way of accessing that data. This means that every source handles it in a slightly different way. They might have different authentication methods or different ways of returning data, like JSON or XML or CSV, for example. The challenge then becomes creating custom integrations that account for each of these variations.

This is easy work for developers, who Bennett said could “do it in their sleep,” but for business users without that expertise, they need to put in an IT request to get access.

This is where the Progress Autonomous REST Connector comes in, providing an easy way for non-technical users to build and deploy data connectors to REST API sources without needing to wait for someone in IT to set it up.

To be able to create these connections to various REST sources, the Autonomous REST Connector Composer transforms data into a format that is easier to work with, such as transforming embedded arrays into standardized tables. “The power users are used to using BI tools, so they’re really just using the Composer to create the model and then from there, they can use it like any other data source,” he said.

For example, a company that uses Tableau Power BI can run their internal data sources through Composer to get that data into a tabular structure that can then be accessed using SQL queries.

While Bennett touted how easy it is to use the Autonomous REST Connector, Progress also offers a number of pre-built templates to make the process even easier. He said that these will get customers eighty percent of the way there and help speed up the integration process.

According to Bennett, the Connector is particularly beneficial for internal projects because internal data is often business-critical and needs to be accessible to do analytics and reporting. Additionally, internal applications are often even less standardized than commercial applications, because they might have added their own proprietary extensions or custom authentication methods.

“Often people will do things like extract and load a relational database to do reporting on it, but that’s not ideal because it adds more moving parts and the data goes stale quickly. The Progress Autonomous REST Connector gives you access to these proprietary resources where you’re not going to get a commercial driver [to help],” he said.

In terms of authentication, the Connector supports the standard method of OAuth 2.0, while also supporting additional forms of authentication that might be seen in an internal application. Compared with commercial applications, internal ones commonly have additional steps involved, such as doing a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) lookup before picking up OAuth 2.0 credentials.

“Sometimes we see OAuth 2.0 plus plus, and what I mean by that is it’s OAuth 2.0, but they’ve added extra stuff to it—whether it’s extra fields and a post body or additional headers—custom authentication enables you to support not only normal OAuth 2.0, but also these kind of extra OAuth [protocols] that we often see in business applications,” he said.

Finally, another situation that’s common in business applications is wanting to be able to filter data in a specific way that may not be typical. For example, instead of seeing all customers, you might only want to see one specific customer or all customers in a specific ZIP code.

“Typically, you’ll see either filters in the URL as query parameters, or maybe you’ll see them in a post body. Sometimes we see these internal applications that do both, and sometimes we see different syntax for setting up these filters. And so, the idea is that the Connector can handle even these non-standard things,“ Bennett said.