backend

May 01 2023

How the Admin Backend Provides Flexibility to IVAAP Customers

The P of IVAAP stands for Platform. As a platform, IVAAP is designed to be modified by INT’s own customers to meet their specific (and sometimes proprietary) needs. Over the years, most of the focus of my blog articles has been on the Data Backend. The Data Backend is the core component of IVAAP that accesses data and makes it available in a standardized form—the IVAAP viewer. The Data Backend is highly specialized for geoscience data. There is, however, another backend, the Admin Backend, that is more generic in nature and that typically doesn’t get as much attention. The goal of this article is to shed some light on how this “other backend” can be customized or consumed to meet customer needs.

Roles of the Admin Backend

The Admin Backend has multiple roles. Some see the Admin Backend as a component managing IVAAP projects. An IVAAP project is essentially an arbitrary grouping of datasets, where each dataset is accessible through the Data Backend. Indeed, the Admin Backend manages projects and all their members. Each member is identified by a URL and often carries metadata, such as its name or location. The actual storage of this information is a PostgreSQL database. The IVAAP Admin Backend provides a simple REST API to the UI to manage project data.

Describing the Admin Backend as a store for projects doesn’t do it justice. It also manages many types of IVAAP entities such as connectors, cloud services, users, groups, dashboards, templates, formulas, and queries. Other data types are geoscience-related, such as curve dictionaries. The Admin Backend is also in charge of providing an audit trail when data is added, updated, or removed. All these features are implemented based on a documented Java API so that INT’s customers can plug their own implementations. Developers are not limited by the REST services that the Admin provides, they can add their own. While the Admin SDK has multiple customization points, the use cases below are the most common.

Customization Use Cases

The first use case of the Admin SDK is the customization of authentication. By default, IVAAP supports two types of authentication. A simple OAUTH2-based authentication, and OpenID Connect. IVAAP customers often have their own authentication system, and IVAAP needs to use that system. To make this possible, the Admin SDK provides a way to customize how users are authenticated, and how sessions are managed and tracked.

The next use case is the customization of key services, typically collection services. For example, the Admin Backend has a service that lists all active users. This service is used by the UI when a template is shared with others. IVAAP customers can plug their own service that will list potential users, for example, listing them from an LDAP server instead of IVAAP’s own PostgreSQL database.

The third use case is the customization of entitlements. Each time a dataset is opened, the Admin Backend is queried to check whether the currently logged-in user has access to this dataset. The default implementation relies on group memberships, but customers can plug their own rules. These rules can be fine-grained, for example, making determinations at the well log levels instead of the well levels.

External Integration Use Cases

The integration of the Admin Backend with other systems goes beyond authentication. The Admin REST services are designed to be called either by a human or a computer. Unlike humans, computers can’t easily log in to a system that requires two-factor authentication. This is why the Admin provides a “Circle of Trust” REST API that allows computers to access its data without the need for a login or password, but rather by a secure exchange of keys. This feature opens new integration use cases.

The first use case for the “Circle of Trust” is the automated retrieval of user activities. Some INT customers require monitoring of user sessions to assess how much IVAAP is used. The REST API for listing user activities is straightforward to use and can be leveraged by a tool outside of IVAAP.

Another use case for the “Circle of Trust” is the automated registration of external workflows. INT customers might have hundreds of machine learning (ML) workflows that are hosted on various systems. With “Circle of Trust” credentials, the endpoints for these workflows can be registered automatically so that they appear as options to IVAAP users.

A Single SDK for Two Backends

The Admin Backend has about 200 REST services, and these services were developed with the same SDK as the Data Backend SDK. It’s the same INT developers who maintain the Data Backend that also maintains the Admin Backend, with no additional training required. It’s not just INT that benefits, but our customers benefit, too. Together, the Data Backend and the Admin Backend provide a unified experience for all Java developers customizing IVAAP servers.

Visit us online at int.com/ivaap for a preview of IVAAP or for a demo of INT’s other data visualization products.

For more information, please visit int.flywheelstaging.com or contact us at intinfo@int.com.

Sep 14 2022

How IVAAP Maximizes Use of HATEOAS Links

Ever since the concept of web services first gained popularity, developers attempting to use these web services have faced two challenges: The first challenge is finding the right service to use; the second challenge is writing the code to call these services. The goal of this article is to describe how IVAAP uses HATEOAS hypermedia links to address both problems. We’ll also try to highlight other use cases benefiting from the concept of hypermedia applied to microservices.

A Brief Description of HATEOAS

Most microservices developed today (including IVAAP’s) use a REST API. REST stands for “REpresentational State Transfer.” It’s a term coined by Roy Fielding, who is also the inventor of “Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State,” or HATEOAS. It describes REST services that use hypermedia links to describe how they relate to other services.

For example, in IVAAP, the metadata of a seismic dataset is typically accessible through a URL such as this one:

https://…/ivaap/api/ds/geofiles/v1/sources/a8b05811-6409-43bb-8902-c9142ab48cff/seismic/cG9zZWlkb24gdmRzIG4gc2VneS9Qb3NlZGlvbiBkZXB0aC9wc2RuMTFfVGJzZG1GX2Z1bGxfd19BR0NfTm92MTFfdmVsNV9kZXB0aF8zMmJpdHMueGd5

Unlike the JSON content returned by a classic REST service, the JSON content returned by this IVAAP service contains more than just the requested metadata. It also contains a “links” JSON node that leads to additional information about this seismic dataset.

A sample JSON output for the IVAAP “seismic metadata” service, as shown in Google Chrome Developer Tools

In the example above, there are multiple HATEOAS links. One of them is the “Geometry” link. The purpose of the seismic geometry service is to expose the shape of seismic surveys. The URL of this service is:

This Geometry service is meant to be used by applications showing seismic datasets on a map. An application leveraging HATEOAS links would typically examine the “links” returned by the “seismic metadata” service to retrieve the URL of the associated “geometry” service. An application not leveraging HATEOAS links would hardcode the logic that /geometry needs to be added to the URL of the “seismic metadata” service to get the same result.

Both approaches are valid, but the HATEOAS approach brings multiple benefits that we are going to detail.

The “Broken Link” Issue Applied to Data

If you surfed in the ’90s, you are certainly familiar with the concept of “broken links.” Back in those days, websites were made of pages maintained by hand, and text on these web pages was often peppered with underlined words (often colored in blue) leading to another page. If the target page was moved, the link would stop working and the web surfer would be greeted by an unhelpful 404 error instead.

The lesson from these early days is that web page URLs are anything but permanent. The initial idea behind HATEOAS links is that this lesson can be applied to web services, too. If an application uses a hard-coded service URL to read data, this application will immediately stop working if that web service is moved. If each microservice describes the URL of related microservices, then the application can just follow URLs instead of using hard-coded versions. The maintenance of URLs becomes a server concern, and no longer a service consumer concern.

The main issue with this concept is that its purported benefits are unproven in the real world. To prove the benefit of this “forward compatibility” approach, you’d have to observe the life-cycle of many microservices (and consumers of these microservices) over a long period of time to determine whether the use of HATEOAS links was worth it. Taking IVAAP as an example, even though the IVAAP microservices use HATEOAS links, changing the URL of an IVAAP REST API is a rare event. One of the reasons is that there is no way to enforce the use of these links on the service consumer side. HATEOAS doesn’t provide a guarantee that no consumer hard-coded any URL. It is even sometimes faster to use hard-coded URLs, for example, to restore dashboards.

The second issue is that the “broken link” issue is a narrow backward compatibility concern, focused on URL changes only. While services may move, their API might also change, and HATEOAS doesn’t provide a way to address the backward compatibility of service APIs.

Discoverability

While HATEOAS links may help address issues associated with changing URLs, HATEOAS links really shine when it comes to discoverability. A component like the IVAAP Data Backend has hundreds of microservices. It doesn’t matter if each one of these services is documented, just finding whether a service exists is a complex task. HATEOAS links clearly indicate all URLs related to the data being accessed, in a consistent manner.

IVAAP is a platform. It was designed so that INT customers can modify the user interface using the IVAAP Client SDK, and we strive to make it as easy as possible. HATEOAS links give contextual documentation of the services that are available for any server-side object that the UI is accessing. As a result, modifying the IVAAP UI doesn’t require client-side developers to discover the server-side REST API before getting started. Developers can be immediately productive.

Testing

Developing a web-based application like IVAAP has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. You need to start by developing the data services first, but you don’t really know how well they work until the UI consuming these services is complete.

To get ahead of the game, there are methods to unit test data services, but they are time-consuming to follow. Just building by hand the right URL to test takes time, especially with long URLs. And because data quality varies, bugs might be data-specific and you need to test a bunch of them to make sure your data services are rock solid.

Following HATEOAS links with Postman.

A widely used tool to inspect and test web services is Postman. Postman “understands” HATEOAS links and testing your work just consists of following links within Postman, just like you would do with an HTML-based website.

The most common use case of the IVAAP Data Backend SDK is when INT customers write a connector that accesses a proprietary data source. The testing steps of such a connector are typically very fast because they don’t require the UI to be ready. Most bugs can be found immediately, just using Postman.

Going Beyond: Automatic UI Generation

Discoverability and testability are well-known benefits of including HATEOAS links in a REST API. IVAAP also uses HATEOAS links to generate part of its user interface. For example, the tree that is shown to users when they open a well is server-driven, not client-driven. The IVAAP UI parses the HATEOAS links and builds a tree of nodes based on them.

Not all wells have the same details of data. Some wells might only have a location, others might have a trajectory. The presence of relevant HATEOAS links is what gives the UI the information on which data is available for that well. The IVAAP UI doesn’t need to understand what a trajectory is to include a trajectory node under a well node. The tree is generated automatically from HATEOAS links.

The nodes under the “AKM-11” well (left), as listed by the HATEOAS link for that well (right).

Not all HATEOAS links associated with an object are meant to be shown as nodes in the UI. By convention, only the HATEOAS links with the attribute “children” set to true should be shown. Customers who want to customize the nodes shown in the UI don’t need to write client-side code. They have complete control by just plugging their own code into the Data Backend.

The same technique is used to build the UI, allowing users to add datasets to their projects. The Data Backend advertises through HATEOAS links how data from a connector can be browsed, and the UI parses these HATEOAS links to build a matching user interface.

User interface generated when listing wells in a “mongo” connector.

Each data source has different capabilities, and this is reflected in the user interface. Some data sources might support search by name, paging, or sorting. For example, when search by name is supported on the server side, the IVAAP UI may propose a search box. IVAAP advertises querying capabilities to the user interface by including a “supportedQueries” attribute along its HATEOAS links.

A sample JSON output for the IVAAP “connector” service, as shown in Google Chrome Developer Tools.

Likewise, it is sometimes convenient to be able to edit the name of a dataset from the same user interface. Not all data sources support name editing, and it’s only when editing is supported by a connector that a relevant HATEOAS link should be included in the server responses.

A sample JSON output for the IVAAP “connector” service, as shown in Google Chrome Developer Tools.

In the response above, not only the Data Backend advertises that data names can be edited, but it also indicates it supports data deletion.

This concept of automated UI generation using HATEOAS links is not a standard use. It requires the addition of attributes that are typically not seen in web services using HATEOAS links. They have powerful tools as they reduce the amount of work on the client side. Actually, the IVAAP REST API is designed to support more complex than the two use cases already mentioned.

A majority of the IVAAP REST services are either services returning a collection of meta-data, or services returning the meta-data of a single dataset. The JSON format of these two types of services is standardized across the IVAAP Data Backend. Because the services provide consistent JSON outputs, it is easy to write a generic UI that will browse through the entire tree of meta-data and even allow editing. In other words, you can write a basic IVAAP client from scratch without much effort on the UI side.

A completely automated UI would not be limited by the search and editing capabilities advertised in HATEOAS links. Each IVAAP REST service comes with its own documentation. This documentation is accessible in the OpenAPI 3.0 format using a standard mechanism.

In this mechanism, if the URL of the service listing wells in a MongoDB database is: https://…/ivaap/api/ds/mongo/v1/sources/a8b05811-6409-43bb-8902-c9142ab48cff/wells/, the URL of its matching OpenAPI documentation would be: https://…/ivaap/api/ds/mongo/v1/sources/a8b05811-6409-43bb-8902-c9142ab48cff/wells/openapispecs

A completely automated UI could expose the search parameters described in this documentation, a bit like SwaggerEditor does. This wouldn’t be limited to search, the same principle can be applied to updating and deleting data.

A form generated automatically by SwaggerEditor from the OpenAPI specification of the wells service.

Going Beyond: Batch Support

Another feature enabled by HATEOAS links is the ability to fetch multiple aspects of a dataset in one HTTP call.

Microservices work best when they do only one thing at a time, but this means the IVAAP client needs to make multiple calls to the Data Backend to restore a dashboard. Currently, Google Chrome only allows up to 6 concurrent HTTP connections per host, sometimes forcing the client to “wait” for the availability of connections. This has a direct impact on the user experience.

To help with this, the IVAAP Data Backend provides a so-called “Batch” REST API to retrieve the content behind multiple URLs in one go. Other servers also have this feature, but what’s different about IVAAP’s Batch API is that it allows developers to leverage HATEOAS links.

For example, if you are building a data map and need to retrieve the metadata of a seismic dataset along with its outline, you would specify to the Batch REST API that you need to retrieve the content behind https://…/ivaap/api/ds/geofiles/v1/sources/a8b05811-6409-43bb-8902-c9142ab48cff/seismic/cG9zZWlkb24gdmRzIG4gc2VneS9Qb3NlZGlvbiBkZXB0aC9wc2RuMTFfVGJzZG1GX2Z1bGxfd19BR0NfTm92MTFfdmVsNV9kZXB0aF8zMmJpdHMueGd5 as well as the content behind the associated “Geometry” HATEOAS link. This method of fetching multiple aspects of a dataset at once is much more expressive than passing multiple URLs to the Batch REST API.

Something that should be noted when it comes to performance is that we made the HATEOAS links an optional feature of IVAAP. Consumers of the IVAAP Data Backend API who don’t use these links can opt to reduce the size of the JSON payload between the client and the server. The default behavior of the Data Backend is to include HATEOAS links, but the collection services can be called in a way that excludes these links completely or only includes specific, named links.

Conclusion

HATEOAS links have been a part of the IVAAP Data Backend since day one. Over time, we found that they pack much more functionality than we initially thought. All these features have a common goal: facilitating the work of the UI developers and accelerating the delivery of software. While I used examples from IVAAP, the ideas in this article can easily be applied to your own data backend.

For more information or for a free demo of IVAAP, visit int.com/products/ivaap/.

Jan 19 2022

An Inside Look at the New Release of the IVAAP Data Backend SDK

INT recently announced the release of IVAAP 2.9. We sat down with Thierry Danard, INT’s VP of Core Platform Technologies, for a quick chat about what this release includes for the Data Backend SDK.

Hi Thierry, what can you tell us about IVAAP 2.9 for the Data Backend?

There are a few low-level changes that won’t make it to the release notes, but that will make a difference for users. For example, we optimized the data caching mechanism. Instead of being based on the number of datasets, the data caches are now based on the size of these datasets. This typically means lower latency as more datasets tend to be cached within the same memory space. This is a feature we initially used only with WITSML wells that we have extended to other connectors and data types.

At a high level, we added a powerful “tiled images” feature. Some INT customers have large rasters that they need to visualize, or that their customers need to visualize as part of a portal. These images are stored as good old TIFF image files on a local file system or in the cloud. To visualize these images in IVAAP, you just need to point at the location of these tiles, and IVAAP does the rest. While the idea of visualizing images online might seem mundane, there is quite a lot of technology to make this happen.

First, these image files are LARGE. They can be up to 4 GB in TIFF format, and that’s a compressed format! To make the visualization of these images seamless, you need to be really good at:

Downloading these files from the cloud, fast
Reading these images in their native format
Rendering these images as small tiles and sending these tiles to the viewer efficiently
Stitching these images back together as one raster on the viewer side
Caching these images long enough, but not too long
Doing all this concurrently, for a large number of simultaneous users

That’s the technology side of it. From a business perspective, what’s really interesting is that there is no preprocessing of the images required. The ingestion workflow requires no specialized tooling. There’s no need to “precut” each TIFF as multiple tiles at multiple resolution levels. The “cutting” is all done on the fly and it’s seamless to end users. This is particularly important to keep storage to a minimum when you migrate your image library to the cloud. When each TIFF file takes gigabytes, a library of only a few thousand files already has a significant footprint, so you don’t want to expand that footprint with file duplication.

Is this image tiling feature something I could use for my own image storage?

Yes. The technology we developed makes abstraction of the storage mechanism possible. The reading, cutting, rendering, and caching are part of the IVAAP Data Backend SDK’s API. You can reuse these parts in your code.

What’s the purpose of this SDK, and how does it apply to images?

One of the strengths of IVAAP is that it allows the visualization of data from multiple data sources. For example, just for visualization of wells, IVAAP supports Peloton WellView, PPDM, WITSML, LAS files in the cloud, etc. These data sources typically share a common data model, but what’s different between them is the medium or protocol to access this data. The typical use case of the IVAAP Data Backend SDK is to facilitate the implementation of that access layer.

Images are treated as data. Just like we have “well” web services, we have “image” web services. The image web services are generic in nature—it’s the same service code running regardless of their underlying storage mechanism. It’s only the access code that differs. As a matter of fact, we implemented access to four types of image stores on top of our SDK:

Images stored locally on disk
Images stored in Amazon S3
Images stored in Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
Images stored in Google Cloud Storage

In this particular example, we used our own SDK to develop both the data layer and the web service layer.

Is the IVAAP Data Backend SDK a web framework?

While this SDK does provide an API to create your own web services, it goes well beyond that. If you call the IVAAP Data Backend SDK a framework, then it’s a highly specialized framework. And it’s not just a web framework, it’s also a data framework. Also, web frameworks tend to force you into a container. To scale your application, you are limited by the capabilities of this container. The IVAAP Data Backend SDK abstracts the container away, giving customers multiple options for how to deploy it and scale it.

From a technical perspective, a good SDK should empower developers. Often, this means requiring the least amount of effort to get the job done. From a business perspective, a good SDK should reduce development costs. Calling the IVAAP Data Backend SDK “yet another web framework” is missing the point of its value. Its value is not about doing the same thing as your favorite “other framework,” it’s about fitting your use case in the most effective way.

Then … how is the IVAAP Data Backend SDK a good fit?

Obviously, the integration with the rest of IVAAP is a strong benefit. You could write your data access object (DAO) layer using the API of your choice, but you would still need to write more mundane aspects, such as:

Exposing this data in a REST API, following the exact protocol that the IVAAP client expects. There would be hundreds of REST services to implement.
Integrating with services from the Admin server. For example, how users are identified, how to find out who has access to what, what are the datasets within a project, etc.

The second fit is that the SDK is designed to work with geoscience data. It integrates the data models of multiple data types, such as wells, seismic, surfaces … and raster images. While the IVAAP Data Backend SDK can be used outside of a geoscience context, a good portion of its API is geoscience-specific.

During design, we were particularly careful not to make any assumptions about how our customers’ geoscience data is stored. No matter how exotic your data systems might be, the IVAAP Data Backend will be able to access them. We are not just talking about storage, we are also talking about real-time feeds and machine learning (ML) workflows. We verified this multiple times. One particularly visible example is OSDU. INT has been on the leading edge of OSDU development, following the multiple iterations or flavors of OSDU services without requiring a change to our SDK.

How is the IVAAP Data Backend SDK effective?

Its API is quite simple to learn. Multiple INT customers have used this SDK to develop their own IVAAP customizations, and its API has always been well received. One aspect that is particularly liked is the lookup architecture. Plugging a class requires no XML, just one Java annotation, and it’s the same annotation used across the entire API. It’s an elegant mechanism, easy to learn, and even easier to use.

The real proof of the IVAAP Data Backend SDK’s effectiveness is the time it takes external developers to learn it and develop their own connector. We tested the effectiveness of the SDK by asking new hires to develop a connector, only armed with their knowledge of Java. Without any prior geoscience knowledge, the average time to get that connector up and running has been 2 weeks.

Another way that the backend keeps developers effective is by not taking away their favorite development tool. While the IVAAP Data Backend uses a powerful cluster architecture in production deployments, the typical developer’s day is with their favorite IDE (NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc.) and a well-known application server (Tomcat, Glassfish). Development is much faster when you don’t need to launch an entire cluster for a simple debugging session.

Effectiveness and fit are key. The goal of a typical framework is to help you get started faster. It provides a shortcut to skip the implementation of the mundane concerns of an application. In IVAAP’s case, for many customers, the application itself is already written. For these customers, the IVAAP Data Backend SDK helps you get finished faster instead. It provides customers with the API to finish the last mile of an IVAAP deployment, the access layer to their proprietary data store.

For more information or for a free demo of IVAAP, visit int.com/products/ivaap/.

Jun 17 2021

How to Extend the IVAAP Data Model with the Backend SDK

The IVAAP Data Backend SDK’s main purpose is to facilitate the integration of INT customers’ data into IVAAP. A typical conversation between INT’s technical team and a prospective customer might go like this:

Can I visualize my data in IVAAP?

Yes, the backend SDK is designed to make this possible, without having to change the UI or even write web services.

What if my data is stored in a proprietary data store?

The SDK doesn’t make any assumptions on how your data is stored. Your data can be hidden away behind REST services, in a SQL database, in files, etc.

What are the steps to integrate my data?

The first step is to map your data model with the IVAAP data model. The second step is to identify, for each entity of that data model, how records are identified uniquely. The third step is to plug your data source. The fourth and final step is to implement, for each entity, the matching finders.

What if I want to extend the IVAAP data model?

My typical answer to this last question is “it depends”. The SDK has various hooks to make this possible. Picking the right “hook” depends on the complexity of what’s being added.

Using Properties

The IVAAP data model was created after researching the commonalities between the industry data models. However, when we built it, we kept in mind that each data store carries its own set of information, information that is useful for users to consume. This is why we made properties a part of the data model itself. From an IVAAP SDK point of view. Properties is a set of name-value pairs that you can associate with specific entities within the IVAAP Data Model.

For example, if a well dataset is backed by an .LAS file in Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, knowing the location of that file is a valuable piece of information as part of a QC workflow. But not all data stores are backed by files, a file location is not necessarily relevant to a user accessing data from PPDM. As a result, the set of properties shown when opening a dataset backed by Azure will typically be different from a set coming from PPDM, even for the same well.

properties dialog example — An example of properties dialog, showing multiple properties of a seismic dataset stored in Amazon S3.

Calling the properties a set of name-value pairs does not do justice to its flexibility. While a simple name+value is the most common use, you can create a tree of properties and attach additional attributes to each name-value pair. The most common additional attribute is a unit, qualifying the value to make this property more of a measurement. Another attribute allows name-value pairs to be invisible to users. The purpose of invisible properties is to facilitate the integration with other systems than the IVAAP client. For example, while a typical user might be interested in the size of a file, this size should be rounded and expressed in KB, MB or GB. An external software consuming the IVAAP Properties REST services would need the exact number of bytes.

One of the benefits of using properties to carry information is that it’s simple to implement your own property finder, and it requires no additional work. No custom REST services to write, and no widget to implement to visualize these properties. The IVAAP HTML5 client is designed to consume the IVAAP services of the data backend, and show these properties in the UI.

Adding Your Own Tables and Documents

One of the limitations of properties is they don’t provide much interaction. Users can only view properties. The simplest way to extend the IVAAP model in a way that users can interact with that data is to add tables. For example, the monthly production of a well is an easy table to make accessible as a node under a well. Once the production of a well is accessible as a table, users have multiple options to graph this production: as a 2D Plot, as a pie chart, as an histogram, etc. And this chart can be saved as part of a dashboard or a template, making IVAAP a portal.

The IVAAP Data Backend SDK has been designed to make the addition of tables a simple task. Just like for properties, the HTML5 Viewer of IVAAP doesn’t need to be customized to discover and display these tables. It’s the services of the data backend that direct the viewer on how to build the data tree shown to users. And while the data backend might advertise many reports, only non-empty reports will be shown as nodes by the viewer.

An example of tabular reports related to a well.

In the many customization projects that I’ve been involved in, the tabular features of IVAAP have been used the most. I have seen dozens of reports under wells. The IVAAP Data Backend makes no assumptions about where this production data is stored relative to where the well is stored. For example, you can mix the schematics from Peloton WellView with the production reports from Peloton ProdView. From a user point of view, the source of the data is invisible, IVAAP combines the data from several sources in a transparent way. Extending the IVAAP data model doesn’t just mean exposing more data from your data source, it also means enriching your data model with data from other sources.

Data enrichment is sometimes achieved just by making accessible the documents associated with a well. For example, for Staatsolie’s portal, the IVAAP UI was giving direct access to the documentation of a well, stored in Schlumberger’s ESearch.

An example of PDF document related to a well.

Adding Your Own Entities and Services

When data cannot be expressed as properties, tables or documents, the next step is to plug your own model. The API of the Backend SDK makes it possible to plug your own entities under any existing entity of the built-in data model. In this use case, not only code to access data needs to be developed, but also code to expose this data to the viewer. The IVAAP data model is mature, so this is a rare occurrence.

There are hundreds of services implemented with the IVAAP Data Backend SDK, developers who embark on a journey involving adding their own data types can be reassured by the fact that the path they follow is the same path the INT developers follow every day as we augment the IVAAP data model. INT makes use of its own SDK every day.

IVAAP Data Backend SDK Homepage — Home page of the website dedicated to the IVAAP Data Backend SDK.

Whether IVAAP customers need to pepper the IVAAP UI with proprietary properties or their own data types, these customers have options. The SDK is designed to make extensions straightforward, not just for INT’s own developers, but for INT customers as well. You do not need to contract INT’s services to roll your own extensions. You can, but you don’t have to. When IVAAP gets deployed, we don’t just give you the keys to IVAAP as an application, we also give you the keys to IVAAP as a platform, where you can independently control its capabilities.

For more information on IVAAP, please visit int.flywheelstaging.com/products/ivaap/