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SHOW API DOCS NAV

REST API

Basics

How the API works Getting Started

Object Properties

Types Coordinates Colors Components Generic Components Line Groups Areas Icons Images Widgets

Meta Data

Adding Displaying Searching Selectors

API Endpoints

Documents

List Get Details Get Content Set Content Create Empty Add Collaborator Change Title Clone Delete

Objects

List Get By Id Get By Selector Create Update Update Multiple Update By Selector Delete

Folders

Create List Change Title Delete

Embeds

Create Static Embed Delete Static Embed Enable Live Embed

Auto Diagram Creation

Request Format Margins, Paddings & Co Components Connections Arrows Groups Nested Groups Tiers Labels Styling Meta Data

IDF Property Reference

Common Properties Component Generic Component Group Connection

Image Creation

From Document From CSV or JSON

API Key

Create List Get Details Delete

Enterprise

Requirements

Executable Image Server Operating System Hardware Database Load Balancer

Setup & Deployment

Installation Configuration Deployment

Authentication

Types Steps Configuration

SSO Integration

How it works Login Form Enabling Webhook Auth Authenticating Users Permissioning Document Access Permissioning Access to Embeds

Azure Active Directory

Configuration iFrame integration LocalStorage Passing Token …via Query String …via Post Message Key Parameter

Groups & Permissions

Introduction Key Concepts Relationships Installation Getting Started Managing Groups Managing Users Assigning Groups to Docs Assigning Groups to Embeds

Server-Side Rendering

How it works Caveats Installation Configuration Stability

Service & Logging

Installation Interacting with the Service Uninstalling Running Multiple Instances Logging to File Logging to Event-Viewer

Arcentry Development

Setup

Prerequisites Installation ...Frontend ...Backend Database Setup Configuration Starting the Server Accessing the App

Architecture Overview

State

Structure Manipulation

Backend & Server

Request Processing Access Control Publish Subscribe Building Executable External Dependencies Testing

Frontend Overview

Structure Object Graph

Frontend Rendering

2D Drawing When does drawing happen?

Arcentry Enterprise - Image Server

Arcentry Enterprise is the commercial on-premise version of Arcentry. You can learn more about it here or contact us at info@arcentry.com.

Arcentry's API is capable of rendering PNG images of diagrams on the server-side and serve them to the client via HTTP. This functionality is exposed via the api/v1/image/from-document/DOC_ID and api/v1/image/create-from-diagram endpoints respectively.

How it works

Both endpoints create or use an existing document, create a static embed, and then load this embed in a Chrome or Chromium browser using the devTools Protocol via Google's Puppeteer library. Once loaded, a screenshot is created and the raw image data from that screenshot is returned to the client. Finally the loaded browser page is closed and the embeds and/or temporary documents are deleted.

Caveats

Using (headless) Chrome/Chromium is currently the only solution for high-quality WebGL rendering on the server-side - but as numerous DevOps professionals have pointed out (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) it can come with some instability and operational overhead in production. In this guide, we're aiming to share the best practices for running Chromium rendering with Arcentry Enterprise.

Installation

Download Chromium from https://storage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win_x64/706915/chrome-win.zip onto the same machine that runs the Arcentry Enterprise API server and unzip it.

Hints:

  • 706915 in the above link is the revision number for Chromium 79 Stable for 64bit windows, released on January 7th, 2020. To find the revision numbers for other versions, please visit http://omahaproxy.appspot.com/and look at the branch_base_position column.
  • If you already have an existing installation of Chrome or Chromium installation on the API server machine, you can skip this step.
  • Chrome/Chromium can also be installed on another machine and controlled remotely. To choose this option, please set chromeExecutablePath in arcentry-conf.yml to null and configure a devToolProcotolEndpoint URL instead.

Configuration

In arcentry-conf.yml set devToolProcotolEndpoint to null and chromeExecutablePath as the path to your executable, e.g.

chromeExecutablePath: "D:\\tmp\\chrome-win\\chrome-win\\chrome.exe"

Hints:

  • Specifying chromeExecutablePath tells Arcentry that it is in charge of managing the browser process. This only works for local installs of Chromium. If you'd rather connect to an existing browser process, either on the local or on a remote machine, set chromeExecutablePath to null and instead specify a devToolProcotolEndpoint, e.g.

    devToolProcotolEndpoint: "http://localhost:9222" chromeExecutablePath: null

    For this to work, Chrome/Chromium must have been started with

    chrome.exe --remote-debugging-port=9222 --headless

    The --headless flag is optional but recommended. It tells Chrome to run as a background process without a User Interface.

Stability

As mentioned initially, certain aspects of this setup, e.g. exact load times, are unfortunately non-deterministic. If you experience stability issues, try increasing the following settings in arcentry-conf.yml.

parallelPageLoadAttempts: 1 diagramRenderCompleteWait: 300 cameraAdjustmentWait: 300