# Export API

## Overview

A government statistician needs monthly transaction data delivered to a national financial intelligence unit in a specific XML schema, on a fixed schedule, with an encrypted transfer and a delivery receipt for audit purposes. Setting that up as a manual process creates operational risk every month. The Export API makes it a configured pipeline: format, schedule, destination, encryption, and retry logic are defined once, and the delivery happens without manual intervention until something needs changing.

The same API handles everything from a one-off CSV extract for an analyst to a high-volume nightly sync feeding an external data warehouse. Format support covers the full range needed in regulated environments: PDF/A-3 for archival, XML and JSON for regulatory submission schemas, Excel for working analysts, and Parquet for analytics platforms.

```mermaid
flowchart TD
    A[Export Request] --> B{Source & Format Selection}
    B -->|PDF/A-3| C[PDF Renderer]
    B -->|Excel| D[Spreadsheet Builder]
    B -->|JSON / XML| E[Schema Transformer]
    B -->|Parquet / CSV| F[Column Encoder]
    C --> G[Compression & Encryption]
    D --> G
    E --> G
    F --> G
    G --> H{Delivery Channel}
    H -->|Cloud Storage| I[S3 / GCS / Azure Blob]
    H -->|SFTP| J[Secure File Transfer]
    H -->|Webhook| K[HTTP Endpoint]
    H -->|Email| L[Encrypted Attachment]
    I --> M[Audit Trail & Data Lineage]
    J --> M
    K --> M
    L --> M
```

## Key Features

- Multi-format export covering PDF/A-3, JSON, CSV, XML, Parquet, Excel, and additional data interchange formats suited to regulatory and intelligence workflows
- High-throughput processing with efficient streaming and batch modes for datasets of any size
- Real-time webhook integration delivering event-driven data to external systems with low latency
- Scheduled export automation with cron-based scheduling and timezone-aware execution for international reporting obligations
- Streaming exports for large datasets, enabling progressive delivery without memory constraints on either side of the transfer
- Compression and encryption options at the job level, with configurable algorithms and key management for classified or sensitive transfers
- Format conversion and data transformation during export, including field mapping and type casting for destination-specific schemas
- Multiple delivery destinations: cloud storage, SFTP, HTTP endpoints, and email
- Export job management with progress monitoring, status tracking, pause and resume, and resumable operations after transient failures
- Automatic retry with exponential backoff for resilient delivery to external systems
- Export templates for repeatable data extraction patterns, reducing configuration overhead for recurring submission types
- Complete audit trail of all export operations with user context and data lineage for compliance and forensic review
- Multi-tenant isolation ensuring organisational export data separation

## Use Cases

- **Regulatory Data Submission**: Compliance teams export structured compliance data in required formats for automated submission to regulatory authorities, with delivery receipts logged to the audit trail
- **Data Warehouse Synchronisation**: Organisations schedule periodic exports to maintain synchronised copies of investigation and analytics data in external warehouses for long-term analysis
- **Partner Data Sharing**: Intelligence teams share investigation results with partner organisations through secure, encrypted export deliveries scoped to the Community of Interest channel
- **Business Intelligence Integration**: Analysts export processed data in analytics-friendly formats for consumption by external BI and reporting platforms, without manual data preparation

## Integration

- Connects with data sources through typed API interfaces for flexible data extraction
- Compatible with major cloud storage providers for automated export delivery
- Supports webhook-based event notification for downstream processing automation
- Role-based access controls governing export permissions by user, format, and destination
- Complete audit logging of all export jobs with data lineage tracking
- Multi-tenant isolation ensuring organisational export data separation

**Last Reviewed:** 2026-02-05
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-14