ULM and REST

Content

• Overview
• REST and JSON
• Revision History

Overview

ULM Cloud's REST APIs enable you to extend ULM functionality into operator and third-party service application UIs. Our comprehensive API library is designed for a variety of user identity and user information management purposes, including:

• Initialize ULM business Processes to perform complex, multi-call operations that guide frontend UIs.
• Identity provisioning and user management tasks (user onboarding, authentication, authorization).
• Service modelling (mapping external account data to ULM Account/Subscription/Feature data entities).
• Service sharing (ULM User-to-A/S/F, Group-to-A/S/F, and User-to-Group associations).
• Service support (retrieve and manage user information in CRM systems).
• High volume machine-to-machine data synchronization between ULM Cloud and an external B/OSS.
• Service entitlement and access in business-to-customer contexts (e.g., authenticate a user and retrieve their service entitlements before granting them access to a service).

REST and JSON

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style built on HTTP standards, and designed around clean, lightweight exchange of data between client and server. RESTful APIs do not return any sort of markup or styling (HTML or CSS). Instead, they return serialized data that a client application consumes, parses, and displays in whatever manner that it requires. Developers can integrate ULM REST APIs across a variety of devices and mediums – from browser-based web UIs and mobile apps, to set-top boxes and smartwatches.

ULM APIs consume and deliver resources using valid JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). JSON provides a clean, human-readable format for data while remaining lean and concise (unlike alternatives such as XML, which can be exceptionally verbose, more difficult to consume, and require more bandwidth per request to exchange data). Because of JSON's widespread adoption for RESTful APIs, developers often have access to high-quality and and high-performance libraries to assist in the serialization and deserialization of data in JSON format across a wide variety of languages, if the library used for web requests does not natively support JSON already.

It is expected that implementations using ULM Cloud APIs are compliant to HTTP specifications, and that clients produce the appropriate headers with each request, namely the Content-Type header that indicates the media type for requests containing serialized data. The value provided with the header must be application/json (the standard media type for data serialized in JSON format), except in cases where a protocol dictates otherwise. Clients must also produce valid JSON on every request. ULM Cloud returns errors when required headers are missing, or when the data provided is not in a valid format.

Revision History

Version	Description
2020.11	Added this topic.