Getting external data real time to populate form vs using a custom table

[dc20]

We use a lot of custom tables in the Service Catalog space to populate data on the catalog item forms.

What are the thoughts of using client scripts to execute REST APIs or JDBC calls to get the data needed at real time rather than using custom tables and daily data imports?

I'm assuming you have to factor in how much data is being returned and populated on the form, how many times that form is being used which determines how many external calls are made which can cause performance concerns.

Any others?

Is there anyone that uses more real time data capturing vs custom tables?

[Manmohan K]

Hi @dc20 

One of the recommended and most used approach will be using a flow designer

You can set up rest API calls inside the flow and use it to populate data on your form

As you said you can also set up client scripts also to make server side calls and get data from third party systems

[dc20]

We are currently in process of creating a Flow and/or Flow Action that includes JDBC Step and will look into calling that Flow and/or Flow Action from a client script to see how that works and the performance of it.

Like to be aware of what others are doing and other things to watch out for.

[sushantmalsure]

Hi @dc20 

I have been into this situation and I remember we ended up putting data in custom table (2nd option) you specified and loading them once in 3 hours (not daily because of the constant update at 3rd party at data level).

Thought convincing the stakeholders was tricky but at last it worked out from proposed daily load to every 3 hours load.

The motivation behind putting this extra efforts is because in some catalogs we have seen 3 mins of load time while fetching the new updated data using client script which was impacting end users a lot but somehow they were managing but the problem started when customer asked to add one more variable with data from 5th tool.

So I would recommend going to loading custom tables instead of client script based solution.