How do we get data out of systems?

This is a fundamental problem every integration engineer needs to ask. There are many answers to this question:

• If the system has web APIs then this might be a convenient way to extract the data you need.

  • Does one needs to build an adapter?

• If the system uses a database , can you query data from this and export it?

• Does the system have some type of automated capability to generate output files - one can read these files and extract the data from here.

• Do we have to resort to screen scraping? This is where we simulate a human user programmatically sending keyboard actions to the user interface of the program and extract the data in this way.