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Application Services Development

This document covers topics of a technical nature on various components within IFS Application Services. These topics include architectural details, APIs, services, and how-tos. As such, this document is targeted towards both developers and administrators who might be interested in knowing more about these technical components, how they work, setting them up, or using the various APIs and services provided in their programs.

When to use this information:

Use this page when you want to know how IFS Application Services works, how to set it up, or using the various APIs and services provided.

Geocoding

Geocoding is the process of converting an address or other sort of name that represents a geographical position, into a coordinate, often in the form of longitude and latitude information. In IFS, we mainly use this to create map positions, which are connected to business objects (entities/LUs).

When geocoding is enabled, you can also make use of a simple API to geocode addresses or place names into map positions, to be stored against objects. This can be used from, for example, an event action connected to a custom event.

You can use the geocoding API for your own configurations in custom events, by calling the following method:

BEGIN  
   Map_Position_API.Retrieve_Map_Position(address_, lu_name_, key_ref_);
   COMMIT; -- Don't forget!  
END;  

Above, lu_name_ and key_ref_ are the LU name and key reference for the object we should connect the new map position to. address_ is the complete address that should be geocoded, as a single line of text. Use a comma (,) to separate address parts. Here are some working example addresses:

  • 200 S Mathilda Ave, Sunnyvale, CA
  • Stenbrogatan 1C, 431 43, Molndal, Sweden
  • Gullbergs Strandgata 15, Goteborg

Geocoding provider

The current geocoding provider is HERE Maps. They update their Geocoder API on a weekly basis to have the most recent address information.

Geocoding licensing

Note that the use of the geocoding API requires licenses for MWO and/or Technician Portal.

Object Connection Transformation (OCT)

For a background, and detailed information about Object Connection Transformation, read the functional end-user documentation under Topics in IFS Cloud / Define System Basic / Object Connection Transformations. For example rules, populate the contents of the Object Connection Transformation screen. If you need to write a custom transformation method (with PL/SQL code) you can look at the source code of any of the existing rules that has an API and a method name in the Transformation Method field.