Web Services

Wikipedia says “A Web service is a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the World Wide Web. In a Web service, Web technology such as the HTTP, originally designed for human-to-machine communication, is utilized for machine-to-machine communication, more specifically for transferring machine readable file formats such as XML and JSON. ”

A complete description is available of the design of the Web Services provided from the UConn FAMIS Data Mart.  All the UConn Now subject areas receive their data from the Web Services instead of making direct connections to the Data Mart or FAMIS Proper.  This allows for better security, more reusable components, shorter development time,  and improved standardization of data interpretation.  Each UConn Now subject area uses specific web services that are described in the individual design sections.

Since all the UConn Now subject areas use the verification functions described in Security, below is the php code from one of the verification functions that calls the CHECK_PERMS method from the UConn FAMIS webservice.  In addition to the method name and the output format of JSON, this code will also eventually pass the userid and the type of access that is being checked, read or update.

    $listApiString = 'https://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . '/api/index.php?key=' . $UCONN_API_KEY . '&method=CHECK_PERMS&format=json';
    $listApiString .= '&value=' . $userId;
    $listApiString .= '&range=' . $accessRequest;