REDCap

Most schema estates take real work to extract: information-schema queries, catalog exports, manifest builds. A REDCap project is the pleasant exception - the entire schema estate is one stable file, the data dictionary CSV, and you almost certainly already know how to download it. That makes the distance from "nothing governed" to "first drift audit" unusually short. This tutorial walks the whole distance: export the dictionary, import it into a governed CoreModels project, run your first audit, and read what comes back. No REDCap credentials are ever shared with CoreModels at any point.

The CoreModels REDCap connector declares all three capabilities - **Import, Audit, Generate** - which means every integration verb on our HTTP surface is live for it. This article is the complete route-by-route reference: what each endpoint takes, what it returns, which role it requires, and which of the two HTTP surfaces it lives on. If you're writing a script, a service, or an internal tool against the REDCap integration, this is the page to keep open.

When the caller is an AI agent rather than a shell script, the interesting question stops being "what's the route?" and becomes "what is the agent allowed to know, and what is it allowed to do?" CoreModels answers that with an MCP server whose vendor-integration tools mirror our HTTP surface exactly - same audit engine, same additive import, same read-only posture - but packaged as typed tools an agent can discover, reason about, and chain. This article walks the four tools that matter for REDCap, with the real arguments, and shows the pattern we recommend for agents that govern clinical research schemas: discover, audit, and only then (with a human's admin endpoint) import.

REDCap's greatest operational strength is also its governance problem: a data manager with the right permissions can change a production instrument in minutes. A validation type quietly switches from `integer` to plain text, a choice list gains a code, a required flag disappears - and every downstream extract, harmonization script, and statistical pipeline inherits the change without a review. The fix isn't to slow REDCap down. It's to make the data dictionary a versioned, gated artifact like any other piece of production configuration. This article builds that gate with CoreModels: a CI audit that fails on drift, a status badge, a rolling history, one-call re-audits, and the scheduled heartbeat that catches drift nobody pushed.

To trust a governance tool you should be able to predict what it does with your data - row by row, column by column. This deep dive opens the hood on the CoreModels REDCap connector: how the data dictionary CSV is parsed, how each REDCap concept lands in the governed graph, which facts ride vendor metadata rather than governed meaning, what triggers each audit rule, and precisely where the mapping is lossy.