Castor

Castor

Setting up for Direct Access

Castor is a cloud-based clinical data platform, enabling researchers to easily capture and integrate data from clinicians, patients, devices, wearables, and EHR systems.

The Castor data capture system is available through their website https://data.castoredc.com.

The Virtual Machines (VMs) however do not allow internet access in your workspace. By opening up a specific internet port you can access the Castor website to download the data to your secure workspace for immediate analysis.

Opening up internet ports is a feature for Workspace Owners, however once opened they will be open for all the members in the workspace. We advise to close internet ports when they are not needed.
  1. Navigate to your workspace and go to the tab External Access.
  2. Click the green and white plus button on the top left (Create new rule) and a pop-up will appear.
  3. Fill in the following details as depicted in the screenshot. You can replace xxx by your own workspace ID number. Press Save.

    Rule Name
    IP Address
    PortCastor443
    Reason
    Castor443
    87.233.198.102
    443
    Accessing Castor from within Workspace



  1. Your new port rule will appear in the list, however it will be inactive. Tick the box and a new pop-up will appear. Opening up ports will come with implications. Read this carefully. When you accept the implications, tick the Yes, I accept [name] box and press Submit. The internet port is now open for the selected VM. Simply untick the box of a specific rule to disable and close the internet port.


The Castor website might be a bit slow to load.
Signing up to Castor must be done on your own desktop, not in the VM. This does not work! Be sure to prepare this in advance.
  1. You can now log in to the VM on which you have the internet port opened, open Google Chrome and type in https://data.castoredc.com. This should now be accessible and you can now log in to the Castor website to retrieve your data. The advantage is that you can export Castor data immediately into a secure environment. Moreover, you can use tools like R and Python to directly connect with Castor.

More information


    • Related Articles

    • Using Castor in Python

      Introduction anDREa would like to thank Reinier van Linschoten for bringing this package and description to our attention. This is a Python package for interacting with the API of Castor Electronic Data Capture (EDC). The package contains functions ...

    • Castor R-Package

      Prerequisites DRE: Owner access to workspace, to install R / RStudio / Rtools in a virtual machine External access to CRAN in the workspace where you want to export the data to (open up port rule) External access to Castor in the workspace where you ...

    • I cannot close one or more ports

      Opening up ports is assocated with risks. Therefore, once a workspace Owner wants to close ports, this should be possible in a short timeframe. If you cannot close one or more ports in the DRE portal, please contact us as soon as possible by ...

    • FAQ

      In this article, we collect Frequently Asked Questions. Please create a ticket on this website or mail us at support@mydre.zohodesk.eu in case your question is not in this list, and you think it should be. The myDRE platform and anDREa What is ...

    • Domains to be whitelisted/allowlisted for known applications

      First version: 2022-11-01 Last updated: 2024-06-07 Last change: Added link to information on extra settings necessary for Stata. Introduction This is a community effort, if you experience issues, see mistakes/updates, or have other applications that ...