Is it possible to connect openLCA through an API

Question

Hi,

All my product information  are already set up in an application.

I would like to send the product information from my application to openLCA to avoid to re-enter all the data.

And how can I read OpenLCA to send the result into my application?

How can I do that? Is there a documentation?

Regards,

Gregory

Comments

Hi, did you find the answer to this?
I have a similar use case where I am conducting a LCA analysis for my product using the OpenLCA software downloaded on my system. However, all the product information is already set up in a SAAS application. After completing the LCA analysis, I would like to send the results to the application.

This is really important. Can someone please pitch in. thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm sure the GreenDelta guys will weigh in here, but I think the olca-ipc may be the solution here. The biggest hurdle I think is taking the time to figure out the mapping of the data in your application to the data in openLCA.

The are other posts within the forum that provide some examples using it.

Another route for inputting the data would be to interface with the database directly using Java (the openLCA databases use Derby), but I think that would be much harder and much more prone to error than olca-ipc.

Comments

Doesn't it have a python interface built in? I wonder what would happen if you just put something like flask in there, though not sure if it can take libraries. I guess it should do. To map the database there is a good post here: https://ask.openlca.org/2435/navigating-the-lca-database-using-sql

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It does have the built-in python interface, but I think that has a pretty limited use case. You can gain access to all the java functions and libraries within openLCA (I think) and do some python-type stuff. But the python stuff is limited. I believe python is limited 2.X, and so I imagine a lot of modern libraries won't work well with it. I'm also not sure where you could place those dependencies to even have openLCA python find it.

Using the olca-ipc on the other hand allows you to use any version of python and whatever other packages you may want. The tradeoff is that you're limited to the functionality within the ipc, but you're still able to do A LOT, including making processes with inventories and product systems...all the stuff I think you're looking to do. It will just take some time to work through the IPC syntax to do it all.