Service request module

A method, system, and computer program product for providing external software applications with access to data elements contained within a database is provided. In one embodiment, a Service Request Module (SRM) receives a request from the external software application for data from the database. The SRM determines whether the requesting application is authorized to access the requested data and, if so, reformulates the request to form a new request, wherein the new request conforms to standards understandable by the database. Once the data is received from the database, the SRM reformats the data into a format desired by the requesting application and transmits the data back to the requesting software application. The present invention, thus allows changes can be made to the database, without requiring that each application that may make calls to the database be edited with new code. Rather, all that needs to be done is to edit a table with Application Program Interface (API) parameters ...