To facilitate system-to-system integration, PPO provides an API (Application Programming Interface) which is exposed as SOAP web services. This article covers:
Business Intelligence (BI) API
The Business intelligence (BI) API functionality gives you the ability to build your own reports and dashboards with PPO data using your BI tool of choice (i.e. Excel, PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik, etc).
Integration web service
This web service can be used for general integration tasks such as retrieving information from PPO as well as updating information in PPO. You can access the web service at the following URL: https://www.ppolive.com/{instance}/webservices/integration.asmx.
User Management web service
This web service allows you to programmatically manage your PPO users, including the ability to retrieve user information, create new users and update user details. You can access the web service at the following URL: https://www.ppolive.com/{instance}/webservices/users.asmx.
Note: In the URLs listed above, replace {instance} with your actual instance name.
Documentation
Comprehensive documentation on the above two web services is available in the two documents linked at the end of this article. The documentation provides details of all the web methods of each web service as well as code samples that show you how to invoke them.
Obtaining a WSDL
You can obtain the WSDL for each web service by navigating to the URL end-points listed above and appending ?wsdl to the query string.
Test pages
The test pages provide a basic web-based front-end for listing and invoking the web services methods from a browser. These test pages are there to allow you to get a feel for the web service methods that are available and do testing in preparation for setting up integration. These test pages should not be used as a mechanism for using the API in a production setting. The test pages can be accessed by entering the above mentioned end-points into a web browser.
Fair use
Although PPO does not restrict the use of the API, in terms of our terms and conditions, we do apply a fair use policy. What this means is that if your use of the API negatively impacts on other users or puts excessive load on our servers, we do reserve the right to suspend such access. It is unlikely that legitimate use of the API would cause such an impact, so it is usually as a result of a runaway process or retrieving large amounts of data.
It is therefore important when planning your integration to ensure that you are only extracting the required data (by using filters), making use of compressed extracts (when extracting large amounts of data), and only updating items that actually require updating (i.e. check whether an item has changed before updating it).