Event Management › Integration with External Event Collection Systems › How You Interface with Third-party Software Applications › AP Web Services

AP Web Services

Third-party products, like service desk or network monitoring applications, can remotely utilize the capabilities of CA Automation Point. CA Automation Point provides a web service API to enable such third-party applications to make requests of an AP server and receive data from an AP server. Such applications can be written in any programming language, can run under any operating system, and can reside on any computer in the corporate network.

Examples of operations that you can perform through the web service API are:

Notifications

• Request that AP send a notification.
• Get the status of a notification.
• Answer a notification

Sessions

• Get status
• Connect/disconnect
• Automate/pause
• Execute a command

Messages

• Get messages that are received and processed by rules in a selected AP session.
• Submit a message into an AP session to be processed by AP rules.

The following sources of documentation can assist you in using CA Automation Point web services.

CA Automation Point Product Guide (this document)

• Why you want to use the AP web services.
• What types of things you can do with the AP web services.
• What programs work together to deliver the AP web services.

CA Automation Point Administrator Guide

• How you configure the AP web service listener on the AP server.
• How you deploy and configure the optional AP web service client on a remote computer.
• How you establish appropriate security.

CA Automation Point Reference Guide

• How you use the AP web service API to perform specific operations.

XML Schema Definitions

• XML documents are used to transmit information to the AP web services. These XML documents are formally defined by XML schemas. The XML schemas for all AP web service XML documents are contained in:

  %AP_HOME%\distrib\websvc\*.xsd
  

• Schemas are exact specifications of particular types of XML documents. Schemas can also be used to programmatically validate an existing XML document. However, user-friendly documentation also exists, which describes the purpose and content of the AP XML documents. Documentation for all AP web service XML schemas is contained in:

  %AP_HOME%\Doc\help\websvc\xmlSchemas\*.html
  

Java Client API

• You can choose to use the CA Automation Point client-side Java API to communicate to the AP web service. You can view that API documentation at:

  %AP_HOME%\Doc\help\websvc\javaAPI\index.html
  

Command Line Client Options

• You can choose to use the CA Automation Point client-side command-line program (named ‘RequestService’) to communicate to the AP web service. You can view the documentation for using that program by running the program with no command-line parameters:

  %AP_HOME%\bin\RequestService
  

The AP web service API utilizes a REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture. A REST architecture uses the HTTP methods POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE against a well-defined URI hierarchy representing CA Automation Point objects. Use these HTTP methods to achieve required CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete).

Most of the AP RESTful HTTP operations include an attached XML payload containing parameters that are associated with the desired operation. Similarly, the replies that you receive and your error results are delivered in XML documents. By parsing the XML reply document, you can process detailed results from your request.

The design of our web service uses Java Servlet technology, so our web service must be deployed under a servlet-compliant application server. Since CA Automation Point already redistributes the Apache Tomcat application server for use with our Notification Website, we also utilize Tomcat to host the AP web service.