Web Services Connectivity Overview

GENESIS provides connectivity to REST services, enabling clients to quickly and easily access data from web APIs. The REST services connectivity is provided by the Web Services point manager service.

GENESIS supports most REST services but there are a few considerations to make when planning to connect to a Web API from GENESIS:

• The data returned from the API must be either in .json (preferred) or .xml format.
• If the API requires an authentication, it must be one of the supported authentication methods:
  • Basic authentication
  • OAuth 2.0
  • NTLM
  • JSON web token (JWT)

For more details on supported authentication methods, refer to Web Services Authentication Methods.

You can configure the connections to REST services in the Project Explorer in Workbench under your project > Data Connectivity > Web Services. Learn more

If the Web Services component is not part of your configuration, you can add it from Workbench. Learn more

Once configured, all web service connections from GENESIS are performed by the Web Services point manager. This service retrieves data from the web API and sends it to clients, as shown in the following diagram.

In most cases, the identity of the Web Services point manager is not important when calling a web API. However, for web APIs that require a client certificate to authenticate with the server, it may be necessary to take the identity of the service into account. More specifically, the user account running the Web Services point manager must have access to reading the desired client certificate from the machine's certificate store.