Using Web Services with External Data Sources

This topic describes external data and web service support for new business objects, including associating scripts with the data.

Many times, customers have data in systems outside of Neurons for ITSM, such as DSM or SalesForce.com, that need to be integrated with Neurons for ITSM. Prior to Neurons for ITSM Release 2015.2, customers had to import that data; however, once the data was imported, it became stale. Also, the imported data could be very large and unnecessarily increase the size of the Neurons for ITSM database.

With this new process, you can have access to data in other systems without having to actually import the data into Neurons for ITSM. This access is accomplished by using web services.

With this process, you can use web services and scripts to create a mapping of the data from the other application to Neurons for ITSM. This allows you to pick and choose which data to integrate and what format to use and to use external data with different properties. From the script, you can make service calls to talk to the external application to get the data and bring it into Neurons for ITSM.

The data in the external application may be in a different format than the data in Neurons for ITSM, and there may be more fields that what Neurons for ITSM needs. The mapping does not have to be one-to-one. You can select the external data to import and configure the mapping. For example, the data in the external application may have 100 fields, but Neurons for ITSM only needs to work with 10 fields. Neurons for ITSM can import only those 10 fields and can map them to the associated fields in the business object in Neurons for ITSM.

One of the most common external data sources that works with Neurons for ITSM is Desktop and Server Management (DSM). You can improve the integration between Neurons for ITSM and DSM by following the processes in this topic.

To drive a more useful integration with DSM, Neurons for ITSM needs to be able to view the data that is stored in DSM. To be effective, this should be done in such a way that changes made in DSM are automatically reflected in Neurons for ITSM.  The way that Neurons for ITSM accesses DSM is through web services.

For more information about the new DSM integration, refer to Configuring the New DSM Integration.

We recommend that you have the following knowledge for working with this process:

Follow these steps to work with an external data source:

There is a new log type starting in Neurons for ITSM Release 2015.2 called Script. Refer to Working with Logs for more information.

To view the information from the log on your monitor, add the following snippet to the bottom of your code:

console.log();

console.debug();

console.error();

You can also check the log at C:\Logs\AppServer.log.

You can also go to the Cache Management workspace, and in the Business objects that marked as external synchronized field, select the external business object. Click Invalidate synchronized data to mark all of the existing records as stale. This forces the application to go to the external application for the data the next time that you access the data.

The following is an example of using web services to allow a user to enter a country name and have the application return the country code.

// web service call

console.info("Script starts: WS_Country - CountryInfoService - ListOfCountryNamesByCode");

var serviceCall = "CountryInfoService";

var serviceRef = "Country Info Service";

var serviceInstance = GetWebService(serviceRef, serviceCall);

var methodCall = "ListOfCountryNamesByCode";

var paramValues = [ null ];

var result = serviceInstance.InvokeMethod(methodCall, paramValues);

function GetCountries(isocode, name)

{

this.ISOCode = isocode;

this.Name = name;

}

var json = [];

for(i=0; i<result.length; i++)

{

json.push(new GetCountries(result[i].sISOCode,result[i].sName));

}

SynchronizeAllHeatData('WS_Country',['ISOCode'],json);

console.info("Script ends: WS_Country - CountryInfoService - ListOfCountryNamesByCode");