Integration Agreements

Overview
Integrations Agreements, sometimes called IAs, or Database Administrator Integration Agreements (DBIAs) are published Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to VistA code that are usable outside of the package that provides the agreement. It is common to think of an API as a subroutine to be called, that provides a particular service when given a set of input variables. More rarely, IAs also cover Package Variables

CUSTODIAL PACKAGE
Every IA has a package that provides the resource, entry point, or format guarantee for the particular Integration Agreement.

STATUS
Integration Agreements have different usage statuses. They may be supported, private, or controlled subscription. A supported IA is one that is able to be used by any code, without limit. A private IA is one that only may be used by a specific package, with a particular purpose. A controlled subscription IA is one that is used by a specific list of packages that subscribe to it.

The VA regularly pubishes the active agreements on the ftp site at
 * ftp://ftp.va.gov/vista/software/Integration%20Agreements/Active%20IAs%20by%20date.txt

The VA also publishes the retired agreements at:
 * ftp://ftp.va.gov/vista/software/Integration%20Agreements/Retired%20IAs.txt

and finally, the text of the agreements (in the form of a CAPTIONED output) are at:
 * ftp://ftp.va.gov/vista/software/Integration%20Agreements/Active%20IAs.txt

Here are the VistApedia archives of those:


 * Active IAs as of July 18, 2008 By Date
 * Active IAs as of July 18, 2008 By IA number
 * Retired IAs as of July 18, 2008 By Date
 * Retired IAs as of July 18, 2008 By IA number

Rather than having a huge download file of all the IAs, the text of the agreements is on individual wiki pages for each Integration Agreement. On the VistApedia Wiki, each integration aggreement is on a page named IA ###, e.g. for integration agreement 2056, the page IA 2056 documents that agreement. That agreement, incidentally, is the Data Retriever Utilities of the Data Base Server API provided by VA FileMan.