Implement Viewing Transactions in Real
Time
James Payne
Managing Director for New Media / Advancement
July 27, 2015
Agenda
 Introductions
 How it works
 Technologies
How It Works 1/4
 Three Processes
 One process reads transactions from
iModules via web services
 The second process aggregates transaction
data and caches the result
 The third process creates web pages from
the cached data
How It Works 2/4
One process reads transactions from iModules
via web services
 Requests transaction synopsis data once a
minute via iModules web services
 Receives and parses XML data from
iModules
 Data is saved into (MongoDB) database
How It Works 2/4
https://api.imodules.com/ws/21/TransactionsQuery.asmx
<soapenv:Header/>
<soapenv:Body>
<tran:GetTransactionsAllSince>
<tran:login>XXXXXX</tran:login>
<tran:password>XXXX</tran:password>
<tran:startDate>2015-07-17T13:59:30</tran:startDate>
<tran:includeFailedTransactions>true</tran:includeFailedTransactions>
<tran:includeNonMembers>true</tran:includeNonMembers>
<tran:includeUnreviewed>true</tran:includeUnreviewed>
<tran:filter></tran:filter>
</tran:GetTransactionsAllSince>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>
How It Works 3/4
The second process aggregates transaction
data and caches the result
 Once a minute, reads data from MongoDB
database for each time interval; five
minutes, one hour, one day, one week, one
month
 Calculates totals and other metrics
 Packages data in the format the web server
will expect
 Caches processed data object into memory
using memcached
How It Works 4/4
The third process creates web pages from the
cached data
 Web server reads data from cache,
MongoDB, or directly from iModules
depending on data type
 Web page is created on the fly
Technologies
• Required…
• iModules Web Services
• Tools of choice for OUR implementation…
• Java programming language
• Linux operating system
• Cron scheduler
• Memcached in-memory cache
• MongoDB database
• Tomcat application server
• Google Graphs
• JQuery Tablesorter
What is a web service?
- Also known as ‘APIs’
- A building block for ‘Service-Oriented
Architecture’ (SOA)
- Used to tie systems together
- Used to provide access by a provider to
services or data to a consumer other than
a browser… But sometimes to a browser
(AJAX)
Documentation
- iModules has very good web service
documentation
- Download it at…
https://confluence.imodules.com/display/help/
iModules+Web+Services+2.1+-+Engineering+Documentation
- Or just search the Internet for
imodules web service 2.1
Access
- You will need a username and
password to access web services
- Tell your account manager that you
would like to use web services
- Your account manager will arrange
access for you
Programming Language
We used Java. Any language will do as long as
it can do the following…
• Allow Internet access (HTTP) to place web
service requests
• Allow parsing of received XML data
• Allow database access
• Allow cache access
• php, Perl, PL/SQL, Visual Basic… Many
others
Operating System
• We used Linux… But any will do.
• Choose the one you are comfortable with
Scheduler
The scheduler runs the web service and data
aggregations processes once per minute
Cron is built into the Linux operating system
Caching
In-memory caching allows very fast access to
difficult-to-produce or frequently retrieved
data
We use memcached – A widely-used opensource cache
- Developed at LiveJournal
- Used by Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube,
Craigslist, many others
Database
Someplace to keep the data safe
We use MongoDB – a ‘NoSQL’ database
- Allows storage of ‘schemaless’ JSON
documents
- Easy to understand and use
- Scalable and performant with minimal
administrative overhead
JavaScript Add-Ins
Google Charts – Allows dynamic graphing of
data
Jquery / Tablesorter – Allows sorting of HTML
tables
Resources
iModules Web Service v2.1 Documentation
https://confluence.imodules.com/display/help/iModules+Web+Services+2.1+
-+Engineering+Documentation
XML
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/
Memcached
http://memcached.org/
MongoDB
https://www.mongodb.org/
Google Charts
https://developers.google.com/chart/
Tablesorter
http://tablesorter.com/docs/
Implement Viewing Transactions in
Real Time
James Payne
james.payne@dartmouth.edu
Questions?