Pitney Bowes MapXtreme - Manual (Page 494)

Appendix D: Extensible Data Providers
Extensible Data Provider Overview
MapXtreme v7.1 501 Developer Guide
There are a few central concepts to understanding how a data provider works and how to go about
creating one. The figure below illustrates the relationship between a few of the key interfaces and
the existing components of the MapXtreme data access engine. The components of an extensible
data provider are shown in lavender with thick borders.
Data Provider
A data provider is a bridge between an application and a data source, which provides mechanisms
for accessing data for use in the application.
The MapXtreme Extensible Data Provider is a collection of interfaces that allows you to access data
from any data source in any data format. It extends the MapXtreme Data Provider which provides
the connection between data and the capabilities of MapXtreme, such as display, query, edit and
analyze.
The term Data Provider is used to refer to a specific implementation of the extensibility interfaces.
For example, MapXtreme includes a Data Provider implementation for accessing SpatiaLite (based
on SQLite) databases. There is an interface in the data provider collection of extensible interfaces
called IDataProvider which forms the basis for a data provider implementation.
Data Source
A data source is a database management system, web service, or other engine or software API that
exposes data and data access capabilities, such as describing, querying, manipulating and relating
data.
An example of a data source is a WFS server that returns map data as a collection of features. The
WFS server is the data source from which Feature types can be exposed as tables. The URL for the
service, and possibly other properties for authentication, define how the data provider will access the
data source. This information is called the data source definition.