Architecture
What is Data Hub?
Mendix Connect includes a set of tools that help you build a landscape of applications. The Catalog, combined with external entities in Studio Pro, consists of modelling tooling that help you define APIs, discover APIs available in your landscape, and use those APIs in your Mendix apps.
- Studio Pro provides you with tools to define services and to use those services in your applications.
- Catalog contains a registration of all the apps, environments, and services that you have running in your landscape, to help you quickly discover the APIs you need in the application you are modeling.
- The Mendix cloud deployment process automatically registers the APIs published and consumed by your applications with the Catalog.
- The Mendix runtime automatically translates your service data needs into the right API calls.
How Do I Use Data Hub on Premises or in My Private Cloud?
You can register data sourceswhen not using the Mendix Cloud, but the functionality provided depends on your situation:
- The Catalog is a multi-tenant development tool in the Mendix Cloud. The Catalog stores metadata, i.e., service contracts, application names, deployment environments. You can use the Catalog when deploying your apps on-prem or in a private cloud, but you need to allow meta-data to be stored in the Mendix cloud.
- External Entities are a low-code abstraction on top of OData REST APIs. When deployed, applications will directly communicate with the APIs, regardless of the deployment scenario. No dependency on Mendix cloud exists.
- The Mendix cloud deployment pipeline automatically registers OData Rest APIs provided and used by Mendix apps in the Catalog. If you use your own CI/CD pipelines, you can either use the Catalog APIs to do this registration, manually register your apps and contracts, or skip registration.
For detailed information, see our documentation on Register Data Sources without the Mendix Cloud.