Documentation
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INDEX

Documentation Library

Search for information on Hornbill Documentation.

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Have questions about this site?

What is this site?

  • This website is Hornbill's new product documentation website and is currently under development.
  • It is intended that all existing and future public-facing documentation we produce will be available to search, browse and share.
  • Hornbill's current documentation is available at Hornbill Wiki but over time this content will be migrated to this documentation site.
  • Please feel free to have a look around at any time.

Why has Hornbill created this site?

  • Hornbill's products have moved on considerably since we introduced it almost 10 years ago. At the time, the MediaWiki tool was sufficient, but we have outgrown it.
  • Our customers are more enterprise focused and more self-sufficient than ever before, so for 2023 and beyond we have established a new documentation platform and team to drive our documentation initiative forwards.
  • We are aiming to deprecate the use of Hornbill Wiki for most Hornbill related documentation.
  • We want to enable our growing partner network with product resources and information, documentation beyond our Wiki approach is required.
  • We could definitely do with some help, and may even pay for some! If you have domain knowledge and would like to help, please check out our Hornbill Docs Contributor Guide and contact the Hornbill docs team at docs@hornbill.com.

What will this site be good for?

  • Community contribution will be facilitated, encouraged, and most welcome.
  • High quality documentation, will be kept up to date as rapidly as our products evolve.
  • Real-time content search and discovery.
  • Articles organized into books, books into libraries, creating a more natural and logical structure to our documentation.
  • Legacy API documentation and various other documentation sources will all be consolidated into a single unified documentation system.
  • Documentation available in browser as well as printable/viewable as PDF on demand.
  • Personalized documentation experience, allowing dark/light mode, article subscriptions, social media sharing and other useful features.
  • Almost all publicly available documentation on docs.hornbill.com will be open-source and available to fork on GitHub, allowing customers to derive their own custom documentation around Hornbill products should they wish to.

What is the timeline for this site?

  • We have taken the decision to publish and make available early, there is very little content at this time.
  • As and when we have completed/usable documentation, it will be published here.
  • We have a host of additional features we wish to add over time, so please watch this space.
  • We expect most of our existing documentation should be reviewed/migrated to docs.hornbill.com over the coming months.
  • The documentation project will be ongoing, will continue to expand, evolve and improve day-by-day.

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Data Polling

Polling Data for System Integration

With some types of integrations, customers will have asked if they can poll our application data source in order to detect change conditions, in order to simulate change events to fire integrations for other systems. While this is simple to implement conceptually, it’s a very inefficient approach, especially when large data sets are concerned, and short polling times are needed to simulate near-real-time integrations. Dataset sizes in Hornbill are hugely variable and tend to grow over time so something that might work today may well become a problem in the future.

Hornbill is fundamentally a transactional system, the underlying application database prioritizes optimization for transactional performance over data query performance, in essence, the application database is not designed or optimized for large dataset queries. Through the user interface, datasets are always managed, and queries are paged and kept small in order to keep user responsiveness optimal.

Warning

If you do need direct database access for on-demand bulk data queries and/or data extraction, this is possible using our Direct Database Access(DDA) Service service. This service is designed for those organizations that wish to use a data warehouse and/or external analytics tools. The DDA Service is designed for this exact purpose, it provides an isolation barrier between your application database and your data extract needs, ensuring large data extractions or complex queries, no matter how frequent, do not have a direct impact on your instances main database that would otherwise impact the responsiveness of your Hornbill instance.

When asked, we will always look at the merit of each request to perform this type of integration, but as a general rule we will not allow large dataset polling of your instance main database, there is no direct database connection to your instance (unless you have access to the DDA Service, and our APIs are generally restricted in the spirit of “fair use”, in our case fair use means, largely transactional integrations.

As an alternative to polling, the Hornbill platform provides a comprehensive set of integration capabilities that are available to customers, these are focused primarily on transactional events. Hornbill can call out to any other system via APIs through our iBridge and ITOM integration capabilities, while any third-party system can call into Hornbill via our comprehensive web service APIs. This is a far better, and far more supportable solution to systems integration.

General Guidelines for inbound (third party to Hornbill) and outbound (Hornbill to third-party) Integrations

  • APIs are available and free to use for transactional inbound integration needs
  • iBridge provides a comprehensive library of ready-made cloud integrations
  • ITOM DevOps edition provides an environment for you to build behind-the-firewall or in-the-cloud custom outbound integrations.
  • Webhooks for system integration

The above also applies to large data set extraction through reports\CSV or other methods including direct Query APIs. Hornbill provides a DDA Service that is far better suited for these requirements and all reporting needs.

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