Introduction to CDA

CDA was one of the first CTools. Its main purpose is to provide data abstraction for multiple kinds of data sources wrapped as web services. It was first created to be used as an interface between the data connections and the Community Dashboard Framework (CDF), but nowadays it can also be used in Report Designer to embed data in third-party applications.

CDA includes many different output types that we can configure, and also includes some configurable cache options to optimize performance, which you will have the chance to learn about. Another great feature in CDA that is somehow related to performance, is to sort and paginate on the server side.

The following diagram is an example of how CDA can be used to acquire data from. CDA is able to provide data to a CDF and/or CDE dashboards. However, an external application can get data directly from CDA using its endpoints. When requested for data, CDA will check whether the cache is enabled and whether there are results...