Corticon No-Code REST Services Access

Access to data via REST has become a necessity as RESTfull services have become the de-facto standard for Web applications API, and as composite applications using REST services are now very common.

With its model-driven rule development, Progress Corticon enables business experts, not coders, to automate and maintain business decisions. Following in that tradition, Corticon 6 now provides a no-code approach to data access for REST services. Thanks to the Autonomous REST Connector, REST services are automatically made available using the same model as any SQL data sources.

Corticon will sample REST services JSON data and create a schema automatically. You can now be up and running in a few minutes.

This has tremendous benefits as the user is provided with a consistent data access experience no matter what the data source is, and does not have to program data access methods. Of course, multiple REST services can be accessed from a single rule flow, allowing true composite application for rule processing.

Even better, your business specialists and rule modelers can write rules with data coming from different types of data sources without having to worry or even know where the data is coming from and what the types and idiosyncrasies of the data sources are. This allows them to focus on the business problem at hand and greatly improve productivity.

Of course, Corticon also caters to technical users and architects, and in this regard, it also provides a mechanism to manually tailor the automatically generated schema or, if they so desire, to even create the entire schema from scratch.

Here is a screenshot of the new menu to add a REST data-source:

And in this picture we can see, at the top, an example REST service JSON data (in Firefox browser). At the bottom, we can see how the auto-discovery process in Corticon intelligently mapped the data to the vocabulary, including the association from a medical procedure code to the various reimbursement rates for different time periods:





Additionally, Corticon supports these features:
• HTTP or HTTPS protocols
• REST requests can be parameterized using query parameters or path parameters.
• Optional authentication with username and password, URL parameter tokens or header tokens.

We won't get into more details in this blog as we have several great resources:
• You can get a whitepaper on what's new in Corticon 6 here, getting into more details on REST as well as other new features in Corticon V6.
• Additionally, you can watch a video that goes through a simple REST service as well as a more complex one with associations between entities. The full video is available here on YouTube.

In conclusion, the world's data is accessible via REST and Corticon allow business users and rule modelers to leverage these treasures of data without coding, helping speed delivery and guarantying better quality.

Thierry Ciot is a Software Architect on the Corticon Business Rule Management System.