PlantView^® Web Services Unlock your Data

Sharing and utilizing data between systems is the key to unlock it's maximum potential. Web services are the defacto standard to share data between both similar and dissimilar systems. The data is in structured, formatted XML and the mechanism to invoke web services is compatible between Windows, Unix and mainframe systems.

Approach and Features

The data model behind PlantView is very rich and complex. Many of the PlantView modules are related to each other and have all of them have sub-components such as notes, attachments, action taken chronologies. The PlantView Web Services assemble the data and do all the heavy lifting for you. PlantView data resides in many database tables. There are many lookup fields, status codes and sets of related information to collect. There are many business rules that relate to access control and security. The PlantView web services are designed to return data according to the same rules used by the various module user interfaces. Optionally, all related and child objects can be automatically loaded. Lookup fields are automatically resolved and returned along with their textual descriptions. Status and condition codes are translated to text fields for display along with their numerical color codes. Links to PlantView data forms are automatically generated. The PlantView portal utilizes these web services to obtain their data.

These PlantView modules have web service interfaces:

• Predictive Maintenance
• Maintenance Basis Optimization
• Report Library
• Component Assessments
• Risk
• Log Books
• Event Reports
• Corrective Actions

How Web Services Work

The PlantView Web Services are not designed to be used by directly by conventional users. They are designed to make programatic access to PlantView by system developers and programmers as easy as possible. The PlantView Web Services are provided with extensive documentation, including a help file listing each of the data structures and web service methods available to be invoked. Tutorials and sample projects are provided as well. For .NET developers, client proxy assemblies have been pre-compiled for your use. For developers on other systems and languages, standard WSDL (web services definition language) and XSD (XML schema) files are provided to describe the messages and methods available.

Web Services Interconnectivity