Connecting to Data through HTTP

Overview

HTTP is one of the primary ways of connecting to data. On the davinci platform, building analytics or visualizations against HTTP data makes it easy to share and collaborate securely with other users.

Authentication

There are three methods of authenteication when using HTTP data.

• No Authtentication - for data that is not secured and is open to all
• Authentication in code - users can hard code their authentication information into whatever http calls they make. While this works, it makes it hard to share and collaborate, as a users credentials are visible in the code.
• Authentication specified as an environment variable - authentication can be set within a .env file that contains user specific environement variables. This solves the issues of shareability, however, whenenver the user moves to a different machine, they need to set up the environment variables on the new desktop
• Authentication through connection to the davinci server - if a user is logged in to the davinci platform, they will receive their pre-configured authentication tokens whenever they use the davinci web access protocols. This makes it easy to build on top of secure data, and still be able to send, share and collaborate, or move to new machines without having to worry about access.