From BioStar v2.7.10, Suprema announced BioStar2 New Local API.
To avoid confusion, please refer to the below table in accordance with the API types.
| Type (Local) | Type (Cloud) | ||
| Development Environment | BioStar2 Local API Server with BioStar2 | BioStar2 v2.7.10 or higher version | BioStar2 Cloud |
| Available API | BioStar2 Local API | BioStar2 New Local API | BioStar2 Cloud API |
| Required License of BioStar 2 | Standard License (Access Control) | Free of Charge | Standard Licence (Access Control) |
| Difference | Required to install BioStar2 Local API Server, Limited APIs | Required upgrading BioStar2 to v2.7.10, or a higher version, Supported all APIs of BioStar2 WebClient | Required to enable BioStar2 Cloud, Limited APIs |
(What is BioStar2 API?)
BioStar2 API
Suprema is offering BioStar2 API, server-level RESTful API, with which you can communicate with BioStar 2 server.
Therefore, you can get data from the server, create users and access control properties like access groups and time schedules. You can also control devices through BioStar2 API. We are not going to take a look at what RESTful API is about, because it’s out of scope of this article. You can find detailed information on RESTful API from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer).
With the server-level API, you can focus your own logic leaving all the complicated tasks like user/device/access control management to BioStar 2 server. This will greatly shorten the development time.
[Figure 1. Automatic User Transfer]
[Figure 2. Automatic Event Transfer]
If you look at Figure 1, you will notice that the middleware is communicating with BioStar 2 Server instead of dealing with the devices. This means that you don’t have to implement user and device management functionality, which is quite a daunting job. Therefore, all the functions you need to implement is getting newly created users from the T&A software and insert them into BioStar 2 by calling BioStar user registration API.
Figure 2 explains how authentication events can be transferred from BioStar 2 to the T&A software. When users authenticate themselves, the authentication events are automatically transferred to BioStar 2 by default. The middleware can request BioStar 2 Server to send the events after a certain time. Then, the middleware inserts the events into the database of the T&A software.