HowtouseInformaticaPowerCenterasaRESTfulWebServiceClient?
By Sat shKumar | July 23 2019Introduction
In today’s world DATA is ubiquitous and critical to the business which eventually increases the need for integration across different platforms like Cloud, Web Service Provider etc When it comes to DataIntegration, business needs effective communication between their software systems and ETL tool to fulfill their needs
This blog post explains what a REST Web Service is, how you can create a Power Center workflow, use REST based method to access the web services via HTTP Transformation
REST Overview
Web Service provides a common platform that allows two different applications on various platforms to communicate and exchange messages between them over HTTP protocol Web Services can be accessed using different methods or styles In Web Service world
REpresentational State Transfer(REST) is a stateless client-server architecture in which Web Services are exposed as URLs The typical method of accessing Web resource in a RESTful system is through various HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE
REST can use SOAP Web Services and any protocol such as HTTP, SOAP
High-Level REST Architecture
REST call using Informatica Power Center
Let us explain with the help of a sample web service which is used in a Retail Industry In a Retail industry, customer can purchase various items from the retailer through online and offline and we need a centralized repository called a DataWarehouse where all the transactional data is fed into The item details are then further normalized into Data Marts to form a common schema which will have facts and dimensions On a large scale environment, this could be a cumbersome task in designing a data model
To overcome this we have business needs to access the data over the network and the best way will be to use the web service So the final order details, pricing, payment details, and shipping
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information are translated internally and saved in a third party system which is either in an XML or JSON format The third-party system hosted over a secured network is accessed via a URL Since this system is based on REST API calls, we use InformaticaPowerCenteras a client to access the server which is a web service API InformaticaDataQuality (IDQ) can also be integrated separately with the Power Center and Informatica MDM to strengthen enterprise data quality
In Power Center, you can use an HTTP transformation to send a request and receive a response from a REST Web service
SuccessStory
5.5% revenue uplift for an Insurance Provider with a Customer-360 view
Learn More SuccessStory
Pre-requisites to configure REST call using HTTP Transformation
Valid REST based URL supporting either XML or JSON
Valid SSL certificates to connect to REST URL outside of the network
Basic Authentication Mechanism(User Name and Password)
Step by Step Process
Creating a Source File
Create a source file which specifies the search parameters to be passed as input to the HTTP transformation
Create HTTP Transformation
Create HTTP transformation with the following input ports:
Username Password
OrderNumber
Base URL
Set the Base URL to get the Order details based on the input parameters passed from the source file
Base URL: https://test-swaggerUI/orders/search
FIGURE 2: SOURCE FILE FIGURE 3: HTTP TRANSFORMATIONSet the HTTP Header parameters
Header parameters in HTTP transformation contain header data for request and response in a specified format such as XML or JSON Following are the parameters:
Default Value: Specify the acceptable values supported by the web service By default, the response will be in JSON If you need XML you need to specify as ‘text/xml’
HTTP Name: For REST API the default value is “Accept”
HTTP Method Selection Type
Specify the type of HTTP method on the URL In our example we are trying to get the order detail information, so specify the type as “GET”
FIGURE 4: BASE URL SETTINGS FIGURE 5: HEADER PARAMETER SETTINGSFIGURE 6: HTTP METHOD SELECTION TYPE
HTTP Output
Pass the HTTP output to either a flat file or an XML parser to parse the information and load it into the target table In this example, we write the output of the HTTP to a flat file
This is how the final mapping will look like
Final Mapping
FIGURE 7: FINAL MAPPING
Create a connection in Workflow manager and run the workflow
Navigate to Workflow manager ->Connections-> Applications->HTTP Transformation
FIGURE 8: HTTP APPLICATION TYPE
Name: Enter the name of the HTTP Transformation which is understandable
UserName: Enter the username of the REST API URL call
Password: Enter the password for the URL
Authentication Type: Select the Authentication type as “Basic”
Create a workflow for the mapping and run the workflow Finally, view the output In our example, for the Order Number “ORD-123”
9: FINAL OUTPUT Issues faced while connecting to HTTP Transformation
While using HTTP Transformation the most common issue is “SSL Certificate Error” So when you run the workflow which is using the final URL you will get the below errors in session logs
Root Cause
This error is caused because the connection to the web service URL or Rest API does not include the certificate data that is needed to authenticate the connection from the certificate provider’s end The certificate bundle does not contain a certificate from a Certificate Authority that the Web service Provider uses
Resolution
Download the SSL certificates for the URL and add to the certificate files located under $INFA HOME/server/bin/ca-bundle crt
Refer the below KB article to know how to add those certificates
HOWTO: Extract certificates fromaHTTPSURL and add to ca-bundle crt file
FIGUREConclusion
This concludes how to create a Power Center Workflow using REST based methods to access a web service using HTTP Transformation, invoke HTTP commands to get data from the web service resource
