Oracle Apex 20.2 is out and has a very interesting new feature, REST Data Source Synchronisation
Why is the REST Data Source Synchronization feature interesting?
Oracle Apex REST Data Source Synchronisation is exciting because it lets you query REST endpoints on the internet on a schedule or on-demand basis and saves the results automatically in database tables.
I think this feature will suit slow-changing data accessible with REST APIs very well. That is, if a REST endpoint data is known to be changing, say few times a day, why should we call the REST endpoint via HTTP every time we wanted to display data on an Apex page? Why would one want to render a page with data over HTTP if that data changes only once a day? Why should we cause network traffic and keep machines busy for data which is not changing often? Or maybe by requirement, you only needed to query a REST endpoint once a day and store it somewhere for data-warehousing.
Wouldn't it be better to store the data in a database table and render it from there every time a page is viewed?
This is exactly what the REST Data Source Synchronisation does. It queries the REST API endpoint and saves the JSON response as data in a database table on a schedule of your choice or on demand.
For my experiment, I used the Public Free London TfL REST API Endpoint from the TfL API which holds data for TfL transportation disruptions and I configured this endpoint to synchronise with my database table every day at 5am.
I even created the Oracle Apex REST Data source inside the apex.oracle.com platform. I used the TfL API Dev platform provided key to make the call from there to the TfL REST endpoint and I managed to sync it once a day on an Oracle Apex Faceted Search page and some charts.
I was able to do all this with zero coding, just pointing the Oracle Apex REST Data Source I created for the TfL API to a table and scheduling the sync to happen once a day at 5am.
To see the working app, go to this link: https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/databasesystems/r/tfl-dashboard/home
Screenshots of the app below
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