In designing a SaaS system on top of Rollbase, I've encountered a situation where I want to set up a store of centralized, system-wide data. Data feeds from external services will regularly update and add to the centralized data. I want to make the centralized data accessible to all subscribers. I'd like to use some of this centralized data in server-side calculations in subscriber apps. Each subscriber app is an instance of a published, managed app. The centralized data is in a single app somewhere on the service. Triggers in subscriber apps somehow access the centralized data when performing some of their calculations. Is that possible? Is there a recommended / best-practice way to implement this? Do I put the centralized data in an app in the special ISV management zone / Private Cloud Master zone? Would there be security issues with using that special zone? Is it better to create a separate, devoted zone for this ("production data zone"?)?
Hi Nathan,
We are just releasing the ability to query fields on the Customer object in the Master zone from a tenant so storing the data in as Customer fields in Master zone may be one way to do it. There should be documentation about this in the upcoming release this weekend.
Another more robust way would be to use the External Tables feature covered in Appendix C here:
https://www.rollbase.com/rollbaseinaction.shtml
If each of your applications points to the same table for that object you get a shared table.
Hope this helps move you forward,
Matt
Ah, OK great. Both really interesting features. Thanks very much. - Nathan
Are either of these possible in a Hosted ISV setup?
Hi Nathan,
Both of these features are exclusively available in private cloud. The reason is the first requires modification to the Master customer object which affects all tenants (something we cannot allow in the shared Rollbase.com environment). The second (external tables) requires Rollbase tables to reside in the local database instance to which you want to integrate with Rollbase.
Hope this helps,
Matt
Thanks, Matt