Integration Services

Viewpoint Constructions Software's Construction Imaging integration services ensure that your
content management solution integrates with your enterprise software, from accounting to ERP to project management to Microsoft.

Integration Services

Viewpoint Construction Software's Construction Imaging deploys various technologies and tools for integration. Integration technologies include API, data scraping, data integration, ODBC, and emulation.

Learn about our integration with specific construction software packages here

Application Programming Interface (API)
An API is a particular set of rules and specifications that a software program can follow to access and make use of the services and resources provided by another particular software program that implements that API. It serves as an interface between different software programs and facilitates their interaction, similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.

APIs can be created for applications, libraries, operating systems, etc, as a way to define their "vocabularies" and resources request conventions (e.g. functions calling conventions). It may include specifications for routines, data structures, object classes, and protocols used to communicate between the consumer program and the implementer program of the API.

Viewpoint maintains its own full API for Construction Imaging, which allows other system to make calls as well as push data and documents—an area in which Viewpoint is well versed.

Data Export
Source data is the origin of information found in electronic media.

Often, when data is captured in one electronic system and then transferred to another, there is a loss of audit trail or the inherent data cannot be absolutely verified. There are systems that provide for absolute data export but then the system imported into has to allow for all available data fields to be imported. Similarly, there are transaction logs in many modern database systems. The acceptance of these transaction records into any new system could be very important for any verification of such imported data.

Viewpoint's Construction Imaging provides data file exports in both batch and job in the event a document is captured into the workflow system whereas a record does not previously exist in the integration target system. Data export files are then imported through the available and commonly used import routines published by the 3rd party or integration target system.

Database Integration
The integration of databases involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of these data. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations both commercial (when two similar companies need to merge their databases) and scientific (combining research results from different bioinformatics repositories, for example). Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to share existing data explodes.

Viewpoint maintains toolkits and several full time database engineers which provide database integrations for many construction specific applications, including advanced validation for workflow, data lookups, data filtering, and data backfills. Viewpoint also deploys technologies to automate this data transfer with Construction Imaging.

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)
ODBC provides a standard software interface for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of programming languages, database systems, and operating systems. Thus, any application can use ODBC to query data from a database, regardless of the platform it is on or DBMS it uses. ODBC accomplishes this by using a driver as a translation layer between the application and the DBMS.

Viewpoint has experienced database engineers, familiar with OCBC-compliant databases with the ability to provide advanced validation for workflow, data lookups, data filtering, and data backfills.

Emulation
Emulation duplicates the functions of one system using a different system, so that the second system behaves like (and appears to be) the first system. This focus on exact reproduction of external behavior is in contrast to some other forms of computer simulation, which can concern an abstract model of the system being simulated.

Viewpoint deploys emulation integrations when an API is not present and the business best practices require the need for computer simulation and validation.

Data Scraping
Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program. The key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user, rather than as input to another program, and is therefore usually neither documented nor structured for convenient parsing.

Viewpoint maintains a set of scrape tools which allow its systems to extract data from other system’s screens. The API tools then pass the information on to the document management system as a call such that it would return data and/or documents as specified.