Question

I am trying to build a service/API. In my scenario there will be a lots of devices that monitor health. For example a heart beat monitor will monitor heart beats send out heart beat data. A pulse rate monitor will monitor pulses send out data and similarly you can magine a lot of devices thats send out data to my service in their own format. The service/API i am trying to build should be able to accept data in any format and store it in a azure table or blob storage. Any pointers on how to get started with this design would be helpful. I am also not sure if asp.net web api or WCF will be a better choice.

Also there is no business logic there in the service i have mentioned. From the service perspective i dont have to know the data’s structure. All i have to do is to persist it it and retrieve it when asked for. Nothing more

Answer 1

Some things to think about …

You are still going to need to be able to identify which data is which, so the minimum you can get away with is a structure with an Id or Name field and then the string data you mention which would contain the rest of the any format data.

So you either need the submitter to understand that format and send it in with the Id or Name field, or you need to set up multiple methods for the users to call when submitting data to the service like:

.addHeartBeat()
.addPulseRate()

etc … and have that method add the Id or Name to your data. Then you would need a corresponding way to request that data back – using the same structure (either the user needs to know the Id, or to call a specific method). You also need to consider what other criteria the requester might use like date ranges, particular patient etc .. then all those possible filter fields need to be separate from the blob data in order to efficiently query it.