OData

Enate & OData

Enate offers a standard Business Information (BI) suite shipped with the product, in the form of Dashboards. BI refers to the aggregation of data generated from the system presented in an easily accessible way to inform the ‘state of business’ within Enate. All interactions within the system such as updating/completing/starting work items, by user and company/contract/service/process etc. generates data which is stored within a production database in real-time. Relevant data is then copied over to a data warehouse which is queried to develop reports and data sources.

The OData service securely exposes the data warehouse tables, specific to your instance of Enate, enabling you to build and develop your own BI, self-serving your data and analytical requirements.

OData is an open standard and not an Enate proprietary implementation. It is assumed that our customers have sufficient skills and resources to effectively manage their own BI requirements using the Enate OData service as a data source.

There are limitations with the OData service that are in place to protect the Enate platform, ensuring a stable, reliable service. These are discussed later in this section.

The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the OData service Enate offers, what it is and examples of how it can be used with common analytical tools such as Tableau, Excel, and Power BI. Links to more detailed technical documentation are provided throughout.

What is OData?

OData (Open Data Protocol) is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming REST APIs. It enables creation of REST-based services which allow resources identified using Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and defined in a data model, to be published and edited by Web clients using simple HTTP messages.

OASIS Open Data Protocol (OData) TC | OASIS

OData helps applications to focus on business logic without worrying about the various API approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, query options, etc. It provides guidance for tracking changes, defining functions/actions for reusable procedures, and sending asynchronous/batch requests.

OData overview - OData | Microsoft Docs

Microsoft initiated OData in 2007. Versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 are released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. Version 4.0 was standardized at OASIS, with a release in March 2014. In April 2015 OASIS submitted OData v4 and OData JSON Format v4 to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for approval as an international standard.

Who is it for?

The OData service is intended for customers who have an existing BI function with the appropriate skills, resources and infrastructure available to them within their organisation. For those clients exploring or just getting started with a BI function within their business, Enate can offer a standard pack of Power BI reports.

How can it be used?

Once the service has been provisioned, Enate will supply a URL and authentication keys to allow connectivity to the service. These credentials are required to connect and view the resources (data tables in the warehouse) made available via the API.

The following section are examples of what this looks like for several common applications, including Tableau Desktop, Power BI Desktop and Excel. This is ideal for day-to-day reporting, however for more advanced analytics, some of our customers “stage” the data into their own database where they can then perform advanced analysis, blending it with other data within their business.

pageOData with TableaupageOData with MS PowerBIpageOData with MS Excel

Staging Server

For some of our customers who have a more established BI function and advanced analytical requirements, they have used other methods of pulling the data via ODBC into their own “staging” server. One approach is to use 3rd party adapters and connectors:

For more information, see our section on using a Staging Server with OData.

What are the Limitations?

In order to protect the Enate Platform, we set default limits on the number of API calls per hour, number of concurrent API calls and the number of records (rows) returned per page. These default settings are as follows:

Attribute	Limit
Max. Requests per hour	2000
Max. Concurrent requests	100
Server-side paging size	1000

As an example, if you have a report that fetches 100K records on a refresh, with the above defaults, you would consume approximately 100 API calls per data refresh and would be limited to doing this same refresh up to 20 times in an hour period.

With the defaults, you will have an hourly limit of retrieving approximately 2M records. These limits can be reviewed upon request.

Other defaults include:

Default	Value
Default format	JSON
Default version	4.0
Authtoken lifetime (days)	180 days (we will contact you to reissue your new token)