🔗Connect Ellipsis Drive to your platform

You can connect Ellipsis Drive (ED) to your platform/app to allow your clients/users to upload, manage, visualize and use their own files within your environment.

Here's why ED is being used as an off-the-shelf solution to take care of this highly complex 'Bring-Your-Own-Data' (BYOD) feature:

• You don't need to worry about the initial user input. Ellipsis Drive sanitises and standardises all user inputs to Ellipsis Drive layers (supporting over 50 formats).

• You do not need to worry about integrating a great variety of user inputs into your environment. Ellipsis Drive makes the standardised user inputs usable in a uniform fashion via a flexible API and packages that are suitable for all common frameworks.

• You don't need to be concerned about scalability and performance. Because user inputs are standardised as Ellipsis Drive layers, scalable and performant data rendering and querying are guaranteed.

• You don't need to worry about the user experience in uploading, managing and visualising their content. Ellipsis Drive offers a highly intuitive interface to drag/drop, organize and style data layers.

• You don't need to worry about all the unforeseen complexities that operationalising a home-cooked BYOD feature brings with it.

Authentication

To effectively connect Ellipsis Drive to your own system, you can use OAuth. This enables your system to access all relevant data and perform all relevant actions, as if it were part of your own backend.

You can temporarily skip the OAuth procedure and refer your user to https://app.ellipsis-drive.com/logIn?referer={your app url}. In this flow Ellipsis Drive will let the user login and send the user back to your app url with a user token in the parameters. This flow is easier to setup as the integration does not require any backend. However, the OAuth flow is preferred as it allows you to keep the user logged in and the procedure is safer.

How to set it up

To use Ellipsis Drive as your BYOD feature you can perform the following steps:

Step 1: Use this article to setup OAuth.

Step 2: Use this package to get a minified Ellipsis Drive file system in your app. Use the OAuth procedure setup in step 1 for authentication.

Step 3: Use one of the mapping packages to display client layers within your app. The package to choose depends on your preferred mapping library. We recommend mapLibre for its capabilities and Leaflet for its ease of use.

Step 4: For complex functionality such as uploading files, managing files or styling you can refer to the Ellipsis Drive UI. Make sure to place ?token={token} in the url so that your user arrives on the app already logged in.

Step 5: You can add more complex functionality to your own app as well by using the openly available API documentation. All functionality within Ellipsis Drive is freely available within the API.

Private instance

To make the integration even more seamless you can consider a private instance of Ellipsis Drive. Aside from offering a Drive dedicated to you, it allows you to style and customize the look and feel of the Ellipsis Drive interface.

In case you have a federated identity server setup in your organization you can leverage that to make sure your Drive is running on the same account system as your other apps. Meaning that users do not need to separately register or login to the Drive.

Instead of integrating with Ellipsis Drive on the account level, you can also integrate on the folder level. More information on this can be found here. The advantage of integrating on the folder level is that the user does not need to use any Ellipsis Drive UI allowing you to better white label the solution.