RS02 - Web Service REST Jobs

Facing the task of integrating applications via REST APIs and wondering how to do it? Don't worry, we have you covered! In this video tutorial, Marcin guides you through the process step by step. Learn how you can use Automic's Web Service REST clients to automate REST API requests with ease.

ℹ️ This Automic Tutorial is part of PEM Automic and was published on January 15th 2025.

📋 Content: 1 Video

🕒 Duration: 10 Minutes

In this course, I will show you step by step how to create and use REST clients in Automic to send requests to REST APIs.

Prerequisites

Before we can get started, there are two important prerequisites we need to have ready for our use:

  1. An active REST agent: make sure that an active RA Web Service REST agent is available in your agent overview.

  2. Object templates: Make sure the object templates are available by creating a new object and searching for “REST”.

Let's look at the steps for the Connection object (CONN):

General information: Define the URL of your REST API. This is the only mandatory field in this object. Authentication: Define the type of authentication your REST API expects. Automic supports the most common methods, and the credentials are stored securely in the Automic database. Resources: Define the resources offered by the REST API. This will help us later when formulating the queries within the job. Headers and query parameters: Here we can define additional headers and query parameters to refine the queries. Proxy settings: A proxy for the connection to the REST API can be set up on the “Proxy” tab if required.

Creating a REST job

As with every job type, we must first define the agent on which the job is going to be run. Since the login data is stored in the CONN object, there is no need to provide any further information.

In the “Web Service” tab, select the previously created CONN object. Here you can also overwrite the automatically generated URI and add headers as well as request parameters in case special settings are required for certain request types.

You can now send your request and check the result.

Extracting information from the reports

You may want to extract information from the Automic reports. REST jobs also allow you to do this.

You can analyze the responses on the “Response” tab. Here you specify which header entries and data should be extracted from the body of the response. You can select various parsing methods and specify what should be done with the extracted data.

Conclusion

To summarize, Web Service REST jobs require a Web Service REST agent and a CONN object. The response to the request and the HTTP return code are always available in the report and can be analyzed in the “Response” tab so that the information can be extracted for later use.

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