Integration Services (OData)

'Integration Services' are services provided by a PlanningSpace tenant which allow client users (either human or machine) to make requests for data held in the tenant through API requests; the requests use the OData standard protocol, hence the terms 'OData API interface' and 'Integration Services' are mentioned somewhat interchangably for PlanningSpace.

PlanningSpace Integration Services are implemented using version 4 of the Open Data protocol (OData). Thus the Integration Services can be used by any client application or tool that supports the OData V4 standard. OData provides a number of useful features:

  • Each OData endpoint of PlanningSpace can output a metadata description of its structure and contents (see Metadata) and this can be automatically processed by client tools to 'auto-discover' the available data.
  • OData has a standardized query language which makes it easier to search the PlanningSpace data and extract precisely the data required (rather than pulling big volumes of raw data over the API connection, and then needing to search and filter it within the tool).
  • OData queries can be used very effectively with visualization tools such as Power BI to build 'data dashboards' for visual, dynamic reports based on PlanningSpace data.

This guide provides basic information on creating an OData data connection for Power BI (see Power BI and OData), Microsoft Power Query for Excel (Using Excel Power Query as a client), and TIBCO Spotfire (Using Tibco Spotfire as a client).

Note: Some commonly-used data analysis applications, such as Tableau, are not compatible with OData V4.

Note for version 16.5 Update 10 and later: Query Builder is a web-based tool for easier construction of complicated OData API request strings. The current version covers the OData requests for periodic or scalar data from Economics result sets in 'wide' table format, i.e., based on the API requests '/PlanningSpaceEconomics/Data/V1/AllPeriodicVariablesWide' or '/PlanningSpaceEconomics/Data/V1/AllScalarVariablesWide'. See Query Builder utility.

The processing of OData API requests by the IPS Server is controlled by a number of server-level settings, which can be set by the IPS Administrator. See the PlanningSpace Deployment Guide (Integration Services). It may be necessary to alter some of these settings to get optimal performance for OData API processing in your PlanningSpace deployment. Note: the settings apply to all tenants and cannot be varied for a particular tenant. The setting 'IntegrationServicesIsServiceEnabled' exists separately for each application (i.e., Dataflow, Economics, Financials, CX PalantirCASH) and controls whether the OData API resources are available or not; the default setting is that integration services are enabled for Dataflow, Economics, and Financials, but disabled for PalantirCASH.

To test building and running OData queries, you can use a command-line tool such as Curl, or Powershell's Invoke-RestMethod, or an API testing environment such as Postman (there is an OData tutorial based on Postman: https://www.odata.org/getting-started/learning-odata-on-postman).

OData API connection libraries exist for a range of programming languages, including .NET, Java and JavaScript. See https://www.odata.org/libraries.

 

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