Application Delivery Management

Manage data sources

Defining a data source in NetScaler Console helps you to use data from external sources as an input while creating or updating StyleBook configurations. Otherwise, you have to explicitly supply each input required by the StyleBook. In NetScaler Console, you can use any managed NetScaler instance as a data source for the input to a StyleBook configuration. You can also define custom data sources which can serve as input when creating or updating configurations.

Collections: Like how a database can have multiple tables, a data source can contain multiple collections. Each collection has a name and contains a list of similar tuples, where each tuple is a set of key-value pairs. For example, a collection can be made up of tuples where each tuple has (<name>: <value>, <virtualip>:<value>).

Data source type: A data source type distinguishes the type of source from which the data is retrieved. NetScaler Console supports two data source types.

  • managed-adc - It is a built-in data source. And, it is used for retrieving data from any existing NetScaler managed by NetScaler Console. For more information, see Use a NetScaler instance as the data source.

    You can also use the target NetScaler instance as a data source. For more information, see Use target NetScaler instances as data sources.

  • Custom data source type - You can define custom data source types where data is locally populated on NetScaler Console.

    Example:

    Consider a data source type Environment. This data source type has two data sources Production and Staging. While creating a StyleBook configuration, the StyleBook user can select any data source of type Environment. Depending on the selection the data values from either Production or Staging are used as input to the StyleBook.

    For more information, see Use custom data sources

Collection type: It describes what type of data that can be stored in a collection tuple. The collection type describes the name of each key in the tuple and its expected type. In a database analogy, a collection type is similar to a database schema for a table where each column has a well-defined name and supporting type.

The following diagram is a general representation of the various components of data sources and how they relate to each other:

Data Source diagram

Manage data sources

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