Integration Connectors
Integration Connectors for ThingWorx enable connections that access services from PTC products and third-party products. When this documentation refers to back-end products or applications, it is referring to the application to which ThingWorx is connected using the Integration Connectors (for example, Windchill PDMLink).
This functionality has the following components:
• Integration Runtime: A microservice that runs outside of ThingWorx. To start the microservice and register it with the ThingWorx Integration Subsystem, see
Initial Setup of Integration Runtime Service for Integration Connectors. You can run multiple Integration Runtime services simultaneously to provide scale and high availability processing for the Integration Connectors.
• Integration Subsystem: A subsystem included with ThingWorx that manages the availability of the Integration Runtimes and the delegation of requests to the registered Integration Runtimes.
• Integration Connectors: Things designed to work with back-end products to get data from these products on-demand and expose the data in ThingWorx Composer so that it can be easily consumed by user interfaces built on the platform.
Integration Connectors are created from Thing Templates. The following Thing Templates are available:
• SwaggerConnector: Connect to a back-end system, other than Windchill, that provides endpoints through a Swagger (OpenAPI) specification. (General purpose OpenAPI (Swagger) connector.) Note the following about SwaggerConnector:
◦ Endpoints are defined by the Swagger specification. Although the Swagger spec can contain endpoints for different types of HTTP methods, the SwaggerConnector will only expose endpoints for DELETE, GET, PATCH, POST, and PUT HTTP methods. For POST methods, only url-encoded-form-data inputs are currently supported and included in the available endpoints. For example, a POST method with multi-part form data would not be included in the list of available endpoints.
◦ SwaggerConnector has a SwaggerJSON property where you can manually enter a valid JSON Swagger schema for the specified server in the configuration. The Swagger specification defined in this property is used to generate all maps and services. This specification is used only if a relative URL is not defined on the configuration page for the Integration Connector Thing.
• WindchillSwaggerConnector: Connect to the Windchill REST endpoints available through the Swagger (OpenAPI) specification. This is the Windchill connector that uses the OpenAPI (Swagger) specification provided with Windchill.