Catalog
How does the Catalog Help with Data Management?
The Catalog is a dedicated API directory tailored to your organization, housing API metadata accessible through an intuitive search interface. It simplifies the process of API reuse and nurtures the growth of comprehensive Mendix application landscapes.
It does so by providing organizations scaling their Mendix footprint with easy API discovery, effective maintenance capabilities, and full control over the APIs in their ecosystem.
How does the Catalog Support Developers in Finding and Using Data?
The Catalog automatically indexes all APIs exposed by Mendix applications. Other APIs can be either manually uploaded, or registered automatically via APIs of the Catalog. Through curation, these APIs can be made discoverable to Mendix developers in the organization.
Mendix developers tasked with API integration benefit from easily searching, finding, understanding, and integrating with the right APIs. The Catalog is interactively usable directly within Mendix Studio Pro, allowing relevant APIs to be used by dragging and dropping them from the integration pane into their project.
This makes using APIs both simpler and faster as developers can drag and drop:
- Odata datasets to Mendix domain models where they will be visualized as External Entities.
- Odata actions to Mendix Microflows as activities to call in the Microflow.
- Business Event to Mendix domain models where they will be visualized as Consumed Business Events. A microflow handler to process the event will be automatically created.
What Contract Types Does the Catalog Support?
The Catalog supports the following contract types:
- OpenAPI contracts for REST APIs.
- $Metadata contracts for OData APIs.
- AsyncAPI contracts for Business Events leveraging the Mendix Event Broker.
- WSDL contracts for SOAP web services.
Data vs Metadata
The Catalog acts as a phonebook or map to the data and capabilities provided by software in your organization. It contains metadata about the applications, environments, services, and versions deployed. For every system registered, the contracts describing its services are parsed and stored, so users can easily find the descriptions of the datasets, logic, and events provided by these systems. The Catalog does not contain any data, only the metadata required to describe these applications and services.
What APIs Are Available for the Catalog?
The Mendix Connect Catalog offers a set of APIs that allow users to programmatically leverage the capabilities of the platform. These APIs are built on open standards with public documentation, which allows for usage from both Mendix apps as well as full-code apps. This in turn enables customers to leverage Data Hub’s functionality in custom ways based on their individual organization (for example, by integrating Data Hub into their CI/CD pipelines).
The following APIs are available:
- Registration API — for registering and updating data sources to the organization’s Mendix Data Hub
- Search API — for searching and retrieving information on registered assets that can be used in your app development
- Transform API — for Mendix users deploying to a non-Mendix environment and generating the request bodies to register data sources published from a Mendix app
For more details, see the Catalog API documentation.
How Is the Catalog Secured?
Security in the Catalog is integrated in the practices that Mendix applies for the whole platform. For an overview on security, see Security.
The Catalog leverages the following capabilities:
- The Catalog is a Mendix app, so it uses the built-in security from the Mendix Runtime
- The Cloud security practices are applied, including encryption, transport layer security, and a secured setup in the Mendix Cloud
- API tokens are issued by the Platform Security layer
How Do I Use Mendix Connect Catalog on Premises or in My Private Cloud?
You can register data sources when not using the Mendix Cloud, but the functionality provided depends on your situation:
- The Catalog is a multi-tenant development tool in the Mendix Cloud. The Catalog stores metadata, i.e., service contracts, application names, deployment environments. You can use the Catalog when deploying your apps on-prem or in a private cloud, but you need to allow meta-data to be stored in the Mendix cloud.
- External Entities are a low-code abstraction on top of OData REST APIs. When deployed, applications will directly communicate with the APIs, regardless of the deployment scenario. No dependency on Mendix cloud exists.
- The Mendix cloud deployment pipeline automatically registers OData Rest APIs provided and used by Mendix apps in the Catalog. If you use your own CI/CD pipelines, you can either use the Catalog APIs to do this registration, manually register your apps and contracts, or skip registration.
For detailed information, see our documentation on Register Data Sources without the Mendix Cloud.