Introduction to the custom data source API

This section illustrates how to build a report based on your implementation of the Flexmonster custom data source API – our custom communication protocol that allows you to retrieve already aggregated data from a server to Flexmonster Pivot.

The server is responsible for fetching data from a data source, as well as processing and aggregating it. Then the data is passed to Flexmonster Pivot in a ready-to-show format.

Advantages of the Flexmonster custom data source API:

• More data sources. Flexmonster retrieves the data from the server in a pre-processed unified format thus delegating the data querying and processing to the server. As a result, you can load the data from any data source, even if it is not supported directly by Flexmonster.
• Reduced browser memory usage. All the calculations are performed on the server side and Flexmonster loads only the required part of the data for the report.
• Larger data amounts. Since only a subset of the data is loaded into the browser, Flexmonster Pivot can visualize reports for larger data volumes.
• Full control over data processing. You can add any additional data processing in your server-side implementation.

To start using the Flexmonster custom data source API, you need to implement the API request handling on your server. We have prepared two sample servers where the handling of these requests is already implemented:

• A quick overview of a sample Node.js server
• A quick overview of a sample .NET Core server

The following guide will walk you through implementing your own server:
Implementing the custom data source API server.