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Extending Rest api to allow querying datasources UNDER REVIEW
6

MVP

When adding or updating elements via Rest Api, for picker fields it is required to provide Id and name. Quite often the name is known, but not the id.
As picker fields are usually based on datasources, it would by great, when the api would be extended with methods to query datasources.

There should be at least two methods:

1) getting a list of all available datasources (overall / by application)
2) query a datasource with a filter. To make it easier, the filter should be passed in as query string

MVP
In reply to: Razvan Ogrezeanu - ENCORSA Romania

This would be great! Also relating to the API would be great if we could do some sort of instance search on a certain field(column from wfelements). We are finding quite often the need of returning all the instances that match a certain filed value.

I'm not sure whether this is a good idea.
1. This could degrade the performance if WEBCON BPS is used for data plumbing.
2. There are (currently) no security mechanism to secure the data sources. Ok, 2021 added an option to limit data sources to specific applications, but this is something else than protecting them against unwanted access,
3. Accessing REST/SOAP data sources would introduce an unnecessary round trip. You could use them directly. Since you are already storing credentials for connecting to the BPS API there's not much difference in storing the others also.

The only benefit would be to access external MSSQL/Oracle databases. If your IDs are based on workflows you could make use of the Report API.

Then again I'm all for getting some kind of search API. :)