With XRAS, you can decide the degree to which you want to integrate XRAS with your local systems. With this flexibility, you can often deploy XRAS quickly and enhance its integration with your local systems over time.

“Stand-alone” XRAS

In the simplest case, you can use XRAS in a fully “stand-alone” mode with no integration with your site. In this mode, you can ask your users and reviewers to use ORCID identities and authentication or to create ACCESS user accounts and use those accounts to log into the default Submit and Review UIs. These option may be advantageous for organizations that do not have a user account management system that supports their external users. 

After submissions are reviewed and approved, you can manually copy award information into your local system from the XRAS Admin interface or from a report containing the necessary details.

Identity Service Integration

To let your user community use the accounts and authentication methods from your site, you can integrate XRAS with your user identity service. In this case, XRAS needs to communicate with your database of user account information, which it does via an Identity Service API that you build and host. You provide your Identity Service API URL, to the XRAS team. 

For documentation on the Identity Service API and its two endpoints, visit
https://allocations-api.access-ci.org/identity

The data fields provided by the API have been selected to help your site’s Admins and Reviewers disambiguate users that may have the same or similar names. Not all values are required, however, if you prefer to share less information.

If you have integrated XRAS with your identity service, you can take advantage of XRAS integration with the ORCID ecosystem, even if you are using the default XRAS-hosted Submit UI. The Submit UI allows users to connect their ORCID IDs and grant your site the necessary permissions to post allocation awards. You can also send existing ORCID permissions to XRAS via the Identity Service API.

XRAS currently supports several different authentication mechanisms: Kerberos, Radius, Shibboleth, and ORCID. If your site has other authentication needs, please contact allocations@access-ci.org.

Accounting Service Integration

If your site has a local Accounting Service to create projects and track usage, XRAS can be integrated with that service to post award and action information. XRAS can also get usage data from your Accounting Service to display to your panels via the Review interface.

You must build and host a local Accounting Service API to support XRAS calls. To provide your Accounting Service API URL, please contact allocations@access-ci.org. 

For documentation on the Accounting Service API and its endpoints, visit
https://allocations-api.access-ci.org/xacct/accounting_service_docs.

Please note that it is possible to build your API support over time. As long as the endpoints return valid responses, you can increase your integration with XRAS by adding these features over time. For example, the GET endpoints can return empty results, and the POST endpoints could simply email the raw JSON to your allocations team for manual entry.

The XRAS team will be developing a “default” Accounting Service API to help clients jumpstart the integration of their local accounting systems.

Client-Hosted Submit UI

To integrate XRAS into your existing environment for user-facing services, you can deploy and host your own Submit UI. The Submit UI communicates with the XRAS backend via a Submit API, so you can build your custom Submit UI in any language or platform. 

For documentation on the Submit API and its endpoints, visit
https://api.xras.org/.

You can start your use of XRAS with the default Submit UI and later decide to deploy your own self-hosted, custom Submit UI. ACCESS and the XRAS team make the code for the default Submit UI available to help you get started in developing your own XRAS submission interface.

If you plan to host your own submit UI, we will need to work together to share an API key so that you can access the XRAS submit API.

If you want to host your own submit UI and have chosen to authenticate your users with ACCESS authentication, please be aware that ACCESS policies prevent hosts outside the access-ci.org domain from directly asking for Kerberos passwords. In such a case, ACCESS offers a proxy service that you can use. And if you are using an access-ci.org domain, a keytab for a service principal needs to be generated. For more information, contact allocations@access-ci.org.