Custom External ValidationService with REST instead of SOAP?

[olw-medcom]

Hey!

I seem to remember that you had implemented support for REST based communication between custom handler and the testbed. I can't seem to find any documentation on it, do you have any?

I would like to rewrite my existing custom java based validation service into a dotnet validation service instead, and instead of going the cumbersome SOAP path, I would prefer to do it via REST 😊

Best regards Oliver

[olw-medcom]

Bonus question:

I can see this new section on the admin settings page:
"Test service callbacks" that sounds veeery interesting for some of our use cases perhaps. Do you have some more information on this? @costas80

As always, thank you!

[costas80]

Hey @olw-medcom! Indeed you can integrate custom extension services, including validation services, via REST API. The reason this is not documented yet is because it's in the nightly build rather than a stable release. You can however find ample information on how to implement and configure these in #199 (the official FHIR validator will implement the ITB's REST API rather the SOAP one).

Regarding the Test service callbacks setting in the system administration panel, this deals specifically with custom services that are calling the ITB's test engine. This happens with messaging services responding to a receive step, or any service sending a log message for a test session. The newly available settings allow you to choose whether callbacks are enabled via SOAP and/or REST (so you can fully deactivate what you don't need), and also to choose whether you require API keys for authentication in such callbacks.

If you enable such API keys, the test services details shall show an automatically assigned unique API key that you will need to include as a HTTP ITB-API-KEY header when calling the test engine.

Note that such callbacks are applicable for validation services (that you mentioned you want to add) only in case you add log entries from your service. Just calling a validator in a verify step is unrelated to callbacks.

As a final note on test service callbacks, a production ITB instance will now also show a health warning if you have enabled callback APIs without enabled API keys.

[olw-medcom]

Hey @costas80, I'm well underway creating my REST API service, it's great!

I'm wondering about this:

Note that such callbacks are applicable for validation services (that you mentioned you want to add) only in case you add log entries from your service

If I were to create a validator service that takes say 30 seconds to complete and has multiple steps, I would like to provide the user with a log for each step to tell them that it's progressing and aren't stuck... Could I use these callbacks for said thing?

[costas80]

Hey @olw-medcom! Yes, this is exactly the kind of use case for logging. The other typical use case is when you want to expose more technical/detailed information that is made available (via the log) but without overburdening the step reports.