In the world of business application and data management, there is OpenEdge. OpenEdge is a platform for rapid application development, deployment and management. The platform incorporates data and application servers, advanced business language (ABL), business rules and business process management. It also encompasses Telerik Platform, which enables cross-platform native mobile development for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
In the world of content management, there is Sitefinity. Sitefinity provides business owners unmatched productivity in content creation and content management. For developers, it features the latest technologies and best practices with MVC support, fully exposed APIs and extensibility on any level. Finally, with the combined power of Sitefinity and Sitefinity Insight, marketers are able to make decisions based on real data, view a 360-degree customer profile, analyze the customer journey and take action by customer journey optimization and personalization.
In your world, you may actually need both. This blog post will demonstrate just one of the many possible integration scenarios between the two systems. We will use the Sitefinity form builder, map the fields towards OpenEdge entities and create new entries through form submission. Finally, we will list all entries in a grid.
We will use the fact that OpenEdge data can easily be exposed via REST services, which we can then consume, whether through the browser or through a mobile application. On the OpenEdge side, you need the Classic AppServer and a WebServer or alternatively, the Progress Application Server. Once we have the service exposed, we can access OpenEdge entities, the so-called business entities, via the exposed services.
In this example, we created an OpenEdge project and used the Sports2000 sample database. We can add any number of business entities to the project, like customers, suppliers and orders. These entities can then be added to the exposed services as resources. A JSON file with the operations and the schema for these resources is generated and we now know which entities we have exposed, their structure and the operations we can perform over them. Now, we can boost the productivity of the business users in Sitefinity by allowing them to bind a form field to the property of an OpenEdge entity.
See the integration in action: