ApiSystemAnalyser

This is a very simple application that connects to the Apteco API and given a DataView will list some metadata about an Apteco FastStats® system.

Background

Apteco FastStats® is part of the Apteco Marketing Suite. It provides a unique combination of speed and power for data exploration, data mining analysis and customer understanding.

The Apteco API provides programmatic access to information held in an Apteco FastStats® database, as well as reporting information generated from Apteco PeopleStage™, the powerful multi channel campaign automation software.

The ApiSystemAnalyser is a sample application that connects to a Apteco FastStats® system via the Apteco API to demonstrate how some simple system metadata can be gathered.

Usage

To use the ApiSystemAnalyser download the latest release from GitHub or build the software via Visual Studio or the .Net Core CLI (see below).

To find out what command line parameters are required, run the console application with no parameters:

You will need the name of a DataView to analyse. To find all the available DataViews configured in the API, run the application with just the base URL of the API specified:

To get the results for a given DataView, enter the base URL of the API, the name of the DataView you want to connect to and a valid username and password:

To return these statistics, the ApiSystemAnalyser goes through the following steps:

1. Logs in to the API at the specified URL
2. Gets the list of systems for the specified DataView from the /{dataViewName}/FastStatsSystems endpoint.
3. For each system returned:
   1. Get each variable from the /{dataViewName}/FastStatsSystems/{systemName}/Variables endpoint and accumulate statistics about the variable (number of codes and number of characters in a code, etc).
4. Output the results to the console.

Implementation

• To see how the ApiClient code was generated from the API's Swagger specification, look at the Readme in the Apteco.ApiSystemAnalyser.ApiClient project.

• The Apteco.ApiSystemAnalyser.Core project contains the business logic for the application (as described above).

• The Apteco.ApiSystemAnalyser.Console project contains a console application entry point that simply gathers the command line parameters and starts the processing.

Build

To build the project, either do so via Visual Studio (2017 or later) or using the dotnet CLI tool.

Visual Studio

Open the ApSystemAnalyser.sln file in Visual Studio and build the project.

To generate the standalone executable, right-click on the Apteco.ApiSystemAnalyser.Console project and choose "Publish...". Then choose the "Folder Profile" and publish that. The binaries will be compiled into Apteco.ApiSystemAnalyser.Console\bin\Release\netcoreapp2.1\win-x64

dotnet CLI

To build the project so that it will run under any archirecture that .Net Core supports (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux), go to the root directory and run dotnet build. This will compile the code so that it can be run using the commands:

cd Apteco.ApiSystemAnalyser.Console\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1
dotnet ApiSystemAnalyser-Console.dll

To build a .exe file that will run on the Windows 64 bit platform, go to the root directory and run

dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64

The binaries will be compiled into Apteco.ApiSystemAnalyser.Console\bin\Release\netcoreapp2.1\win-x64