Swagger UI

First Steps

Configuration

The ACRON REST API is configured using the ACRON Admin, the configuration is unique for each plant.

Access Rights

As a first layer of authentication in order to connect to the ACRON REST API, a client needs to provide a set of credentials for application level authentication.

These credentials are configured in the ACRON Admin in the "Access rights" section, and consist of a name and password for each individual application, as well as an optional description.

Application-level Authentication

In order to initiate communication with the ACRON REST API a client application needs to call the AuthenticateApp method passing the appName and password of the access right it was assigned in the ACRON Admin.

The method returns an access token (Bearer / JWT token) that expires after 20 minutes and can be renewed with the help of the provided refreshToken and the AuthenticateRefreshtoken method.

The access token has to be passed as part of the Authentication header for all subsequent operations.

User-level Authentication

In order to gain access to a plant, the client application then has to pass a valid set of user credentials for an ACRON user that is configured in said plant via the Login method.

The method returns a user token, which expires after 20 minutes and can be renewed with the help of LoginRefresh method and the provided refreshToken.

The user token once again has to be passed as part of the "Acron" header for all subsequent operations.

Configuration Access

This step is optional, configuration access is only needed to perform changes to the plant configuration.

By default a user has read-only access to the plant configuration as well as process data. In order to make changes to the plant configuration, the "CreateAccess" method will enable exclusive write access to the configuration for this user.

If "CreateAccess" fails, the "HasAccess" method provides information on the user that currently has exclusive write access to the plant configuration.

It is imperative to relinquish write access to the plant configuration after all changes are saved by calling the "ReleaseAccess" method.
"ReleaseAccess" will fail if there are any unsaved changes, which may be discarded by calling "DiscardChanges" first.

Validate and Save

This step is optional, validation and saving changes is only required when editing the plant configuration.

After making changes to the plant configuration, validation of the plant configuration must be performed before saving.

There are two possible ways to initiate validation:

- The "./General/Validate" method performs a full validation of the whole plant, which is theoretically the safest, but also the slowest variant.

- There is a Validate method for each subsection of the plant configuration, which performs a partial validation only on this subsection.

When performing only partial plant validation, great care has to be exercised that each subsection that was modified was in turn also validated thereafter.

If plant validation was successful, the "./General/Save" method may be called in order to save all changes to the plant configuration.

Logout

Finally, a user logout via the Logout method may be performed.

Unsaved changes will be reflected in subsequent calls to methods that reference the plant configuration. However, all methods that retrieve data from the ACRON REST API will NOT use the new plant configuration until it is saved.