Compass at a Glance

Compass is Cosential’s RESTful API for creating, updating, searching and removing work product elements in Cosential.

REST

HTTP actions are used as follows:

HTTP GET is used to read and search data
HTTP POST is used to write new data
HTTP PUT is used to update data
HTTP DELETE is used to delete data

Secure

Compass uses HTTP standard authentication to acquire an access token. The access token is used in subsequent API calls to identify the authenticated API client and user. The access token expires in 30 minutes of inactivity. Compass requires standard TLS\SSL encryption to secure all API communication.

JSON

Compass works with a data exchange format called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, https://www.json.org). JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format. It's easy for humans to read and write and for machines to parse and generate. It's based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language. Most integration tools and ETL packages have native support for JSON.

Search

Compass supports searching on almost all primary elements and uses Lucene query language, an easy to learn, highly dynamic, and powerful search syntax.

Schema discovery

Cosential data elements have complex relationships and are user customizable. Compass provides an interface to discover how data elements relate to other data elements and how they have been customized by the currently authenticated user.