In today’s interconnected world, web APIs play a crucial role in enabling data exchange between applications. When dealing with large datasets, efficient data retrieval becomes paramount to ensure optimal performance and a seamless user experience. This is where API pagination comes into play.
What is API Pagination?
API pagination is a technique used in web APIs to retrieve a large amount of data in smaller, manageable chunks or pages. It allows clients to request a subset of the total data available, reducing the load on the server and improving performance. Pagination is commonly employed when working with APIs that return collections of resources or when the dataset is too large to be returned in a single request.
Benefits of API Pagination
- Improved performance: By returning data in smaller chunks, API pagination reduces the response size, leading to faster data retrieval and improved overall performance. It avoids overwhelming the client with a large payload that could potentially cause network issues or slow down the application.
- Reduced server load: Pagination allows the server to distribute the load of serving data by handling smaller requests. Instead of processing and returning the entire dataset in one go, the server can process and serve data in smaller portions, reducing resource utilization and improving scalability.
- Efficient use of resources: With pagination, clients can fetch only the data they need, minimizing unnecessary data transfer and reducing bandwidth usage.
In this blog, we will explore how to implement API pagination using AFAS, a popular business automation software platform. By leveraging pagination, you can enhance data management and improve the user experience when working with extensive data sets in AFAS.
What is AFAS?
AFAS is a comprehensive software platform that offers various business automation solutions, including HR management, finance, CRM, project management, and more. It allows organizations to streamline their operations and centralize data management across different departments and processes.
How to Implement API Pagination in AFAS?
As an AFAS consultant, it is important to fathom the Pagination Parameters and irrespective of SOAP or REST, the way to control the pagination would remain same and we may need to simply follow below steps.
Step 1: Understand the Data Structure and Pagination Parameters
To implement pagination effectively, it’s essential to understand the data structure and the available pagination parameters in AFAS. AFAS typically provides parameters like ‘skip’ and ‘take’ to control the pagination process. This approach of specifying the number of records to skip (skip) and maximum number of records to return (take) is known as Offset-based Pagination.
- ‘skip’: The index of the first item to retrieve.
- ‘take’: The number of items to retrieve per API call.
You have to make a separate API call for each collection to be retrieved, until you get a collection back with no more records.
Step 2: Retrieve Data Using Pagination Parameters
Once you have identified the pagination parameters, you can use them to retrieve data from AFAS. This can be done through the available APIs or query mechanisms provided by AFAS. The specific approach depends on the AFAS implementation and the data retrieval methods they offer.
For example, you might construct a REST API request as follows:
GET https://{hostname}:{port}/ProfitRestServices/connectors/{connectorId}?skip=n&take=n
This API request would retrieve the data starting from the specified ‘skip’ index and fetching the desired ‘take’ of items per call. Below example illustrates that we are skipping initial 2 records and fetching next 5 records :
GET https://{hostname}:{port}/ProfitRestServices/connectors/{connectorId}?skip=2&take=5
{
"“skip”": 2,
"“take”": 5,
"“rows”": [
{
"“record_number”": 3
},
{
"“record_number”": 4
},
{
"“record_number”": 5
},
{
"“record_number”": 6
},
{
"“record_number”": 7
}
]
}How to Implement AFAS API Pagination in WSO2 Micro Integrator?
This section is crafted exclusively for WSO2 developers like you, who are passionate about creating innovative solutions using this powerful integration platform. Implementing pagination with AFAS in WSO2 involves integrating the AFAS API and leveraging the capabilities of WSO2 API Manager or WSO2 Micro Integrator. Here’s an approach to implementing AFAS pagination in WSO2.
We will create a REST API in WSO2 Micro Integrator which takes only ‘skip’ and ‘take’ parameters as input query parameters and returns a JSON payload as an API response. Within the API implementation, handle the pagination logic using the parameters (skip and take) obtained from AFAS REST Get Connector. It is important to note that in this example we are not performing any transformations or filtering on the AFAS response in WSO2 and we are returning the response as we receive it. It is always possible to transform the AFAS response as per the requirements.
<?xml version=”1.0" encoding=”UTF-8"?>
<api context=”/pagination” name=”AFASPagination” xmlns=”http://ws.apache.org/ns/synapse">
<resource methods=”GET” uri-template=”/afas?skip={skip}&take={take}”>
<inSequence>
<property name=”uri.var.skip” expression=”$url:skip”/>
<property name=”uri.var.take” expression=”$url:take”/>
<property action=”remove” name=”TRANSPORT_HEADERS” scope=”axis2"/>
<property name=”REST_URL_POSTFIX” action=”remove” scope=”axis2"/>
<property name=”NO_ENTITY_BODY” value=”true” scope=”axis2" type=”BOOLEAN”/>
<property name=”Authorization” expression=”concat(‘AfasToken ‘,$ctx:<Token>” type=”STRING” scope=”transport” />
<call>
<endpoint>
<http method=”get” uri-template=”https://{AFAShostname}:{port}/ProfitRestServices/connectors/{connectorId}?skip={uri.var.skip}&take={uri.var.take}"/>
</endpoint>
</call>
<respond/>
</inSequence>
<outSequence/>
<faultSequence/>
</resource>
</api>Verify the API Response
Call the API which is created above using any REST client (Postman/Insomnia),
curl — location ‘https://localhost:8253/pagination/afas?skip=2&take=5′
Conclusion
API pagination is a powerful technique that enhances the performance, scalability, and efficiency of data retrieval in web APIs. By breaking down large datasets into smaller pages, API pagination empowers clients to fetch only the required data, resulting in improved user experiences and reduced server load. Understanding the concepts and best practices of API pagination enables developers to design and implement robust and efficient APIs that handle large-scale data seamlessly.
