EPiServer License Data Exporter

EPiServer recently released an API for their license data.  The idea is that you can export license information from EPiServer and bring it down to your own infrastructure to query and otherwise manipulate it.

I had been asking for something like it for years, starting with this blog post: "Why Your App Needs Automated Data Export." In that post, I complained (nicely) about both EPiServer and Insightly, a CRM my company uses.

After that post, Insightly created their API, and it was awesome in its simplicity – it just gave you a basic bulk export, from which you could do anything.  The idea is that your local tools are better at querying and data manipulation than a web-based system, so if I can just get this data down to my local machine, I’m better off.

EPiServer was finally able to take a run at this system, and I worked with the internal team on it. I explained what I was looking for, and they responded with exactly what I asked for: simple, API-driven, bulk export.  It’s not complicated and it works beautifully.

I adapted a library that I wrote for Insightly to download the data and populate SQL database.  It’s now on Github:

EPiServer License Data Exporter

Provide an API key and a connection string, and this command line utility will populate a local SQL Server database with all your license information, enabling you to develop reporting around that information.  It’s extensible as well – all the objects are run through “mapping objects” with properties that use XPath to extract data.  It should be awfully easy for any .Net developer to figure out.

I hope you get some value out of it, and I welcome pull requests if you have changes.