You can integrate your third-party physical access control system (PACS) with Badge by creating and deploying a web service that communicates with Badge using the available Badge API calls. The web service you deploy is called a PACS adapter.

Your PACS adapter is a RESTful web service translation layer between Identity Server and your PACS. The custom PACS adapter that you create must support receiving the API calls that are required to communicate with Badge. This PACS adapter API reference explains how to programmatically access Badge’s PACS functionality using the required API calls.

Prerequisites

Before you use this API documentation, you should be familiar with the following:

• JSON notation
• REST API concepts

The web service on which your PACS adapter is deployed must be reachable from Identity Server.

• Logging
  • Logging on the adapter: The adapter must log all requests it receives. Each call to activate_resources must also indicate the outcome of the request—whether the user was granted or denied access to the resource. In the case of denials, it is recommended that the reason for the denial be logged. MicroStrategy recommends using a database for the log. It is also recommended that the adapter log how much time is spent in servicing each request. This is useful for troubleshooting performance issues.
  • Logging on your PACS web server: The adapter should leave an audit trail on your PACS web server, assuming that the PACS server API supports such functionality. Occasional failures in communication may result in missing log entries on the PACS web server. In such cases, the log on the adapter may be used for auditing and troubleshooting.
• Security: To increase the security of your PACS integration with Badge, it is strongly recommended that you implement the following:
  • You deploy your PACS adapter on a web server that is reachable only using HTTPS with a valid Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate that is issued by a well-known certificate authority.
  • You deploy your PACS adapter on a web server that accepts incoming requests only from Identity Server.

Creating your custom PACS adapter

Your PACS adapter must support receiving the following API calls:

• List resources
• Activate resources
• Diagnose
• Flush cache
• Manage badges

For information about the structure of the API documentation, see Understanding the Badge API document structure.

Related topic

After you have created a custom PACS adapter, you can configure Badge to work with it. For steps, see Configuring your custom PACS adapter for Badge.