Alongside Aras Innovator® Release 31, we provided a new set of functionalities called Configurable Web Services, or CWS. CWS is a platform component, which means it comes out-of-the-box and can be used across the platform.

What is Configurable Web Services?

Configurable Web Services is a low-code tool for defining and publishing custom REST APIs within your Aras Innovator® instance. It allows you to create a robust API without utilizing SQL, AML, or any coding. While we continue to provide access to our standard REST API, this new tool will enable you to expose subsets of data with fine-tuned permissions. All of this can be configured in Aras Innovator with an easy-to-use user interface (UI).

Let’s take a look at how that works.

A CWS Example: Creating a new web service

Since CWS is an administrative feature, it appears in the Table of Contents under Administration > External Control.

We’re going to create a new Web Service. A Web Service is the foundation of CWS, allowing you to create one or multiple different endpoints for your needs.

On the form, we’re greeted with some basic parameters for our Web Service and two relationships. API Keys can be generated to allow external applications to communicate with Aras Innovator easily. Endpoints are exactly what they sound like. Here, you can define OData endpoints for your Web Service. For my example, we’ll be configuring an Endpoint that only has access to Part and Part BOM data.

In this screenshot, I’ve already added the Part ItemType to our selection of Web Service Items. On the right, you can see that for each ItemType we select, we can modify what our end users have access to. This can be things like properties and relationships or what kind of actions the users can perform. For this example, I’m just going to get permissions. Let’s make sure we also add the Part BOM relationship as well:

Once we’ve done that, we can see that the Part BOM relationship is also one of the Web Service Items. Let’s take the same action and then move on to properties.

Looking at the Part_BOM Properties, we can see that we need the ID since it’s a relationship, a source, and a related ID. I’ve also added quantity to that example so we can see how many of each Part there are in a given BOM.

And there we have it! Once we’ve saved our Endpoint and the parent Web Service, we will have a URL we can use to query our data.

In a follow-up blog, I’ll go over connecting to and utilizing the newly created endpoint! While this was a pretty high-level overview of CWS, there’s so much more that it can do. We’ll be posting more content about CWS in the coming weeks, along with a sample application showing off the strength of this tool. Let us know if you’d utilize this in your business for external connections. And feel free to reach out to me with any questions.

 

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Aras Labs