I am trying to wrap my head around Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. Apparently it's a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics. I need to have more back-end to that solution, because as it is right now I'm either lacking permissions (or extra paid access to Microsoft resources) or missing a chunk of documentation, because I'm unable to:
Change default language across the board - I can switch MS Dynamics to any language I want, but it will work for a shell only. Anything that's CfS specific, is in English. Do I remove the demo data and import my own scopes and data? As only thing available are database and Cube for BI analytics and JSON files describing CfS structure in general (that's in CDM), do I really have to create it from scratch? This brings me to second question:
Access entry-level data that's already in demo version - I need to see what's in the database the CfS is using, or be able to modify it. Is there any way to get to it via Business Central, if at all possible?
Since I will be preparing several presentations for potential customers, I need a way to quickly create a dataset based on initial and very basic information provided by each customer, how can I do that with trial user
I work for a company that's Microsoft Certified Partner, so logically resources for what I need should be available to me, but either links in the documentation are dead (and some are, as they redirect to general info) or require some special access level (or are dead, but error message is really not helpful at all).
Is there somewhere else I can go? The Documentation page offers little towards what I need...
P.S. I think I should tag this question with CfS specific tags, but not enough rep...
Related
actually I am working with PDI 8.2, however I am able to upgrade to 9.0.
The main issue is that a customer wants to pull data from salesforce which works well so far. But he is using the Enterprise Web Services API with version 48.0, latest Pentaho supports v47.0 only.
I strongly assume that reading via v48.0 won't work with PDI so that I have to build a workaround. Could anyone point me to a feasible solution? To be honest, I don't even know whether the Enterprise or the Partner API is relevant for Pentaho. Have got my own SF-Account so that I could try around with the APIs.
Is the "Web Services lookup" the right step for the workaround?
Any answer would be appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Oh man, what a crazy question, all over the place.
I strongly assume that reading via v48.0 won't work
You'd have to try it but it should work. Salesforce has 3 releases a year and that's when they upgrade API versions. We're in Spring'20 now, it's v.48. That doesn't mean anything below is deprecated. You should have no problems calling with any API version >= 20. From what I remember their master service agreement states that API version released will stay up at least 3 years. Well, v.20 is 9 years old and still going strong...
Check for example https://baa.my.salesforce.com/services/data/ (if your client has "My Domain" enabled you can use that too instead of some unknown company), you should see a list similar to this: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/dome_versions.htm (no login required, that'd be a chicken & egg situation. You need to choose API version you want when making the login call).
So... what does your integration do. I assume it reads or writes to SF tables (objects), pretty basic stuff. In that sense the 47 vs 48 won't matter much. You should still see Accounts, Contacts, custom objects... You won't see tables created specifically in v 48. Unless you must see something mentioned in Spring'20 release notes I wouldn't worry too much.
If your client wrote a specific class (service) to present you with data and it's written in v.48 it might not be visible when you login as v.47. But then they can just downgrade the version and all should be well. Such custom services are rarely usable by generic ETL tools anyway so it'd be a concern only if you do custom coding.
whether the Enterprise or the Partner API is relevant for Pentaho
Sounds like your ETL tool uses SOAP API. Salesforce offers 2 versions of the WSDL file with service definitions.
"Partner" is generic, all SF orgs in the world produce same WSDL file. It doesn't contain any concrete info about tables, columns, custom services written on top of vanilla salesforce. But it does contain info how to call login() or run a "describe" that gives you all tables your user can see, what are their names, what are columns, data types... So you learn stuff at runtime. "Partner" is great when you're building a generic reusable app that can connect to any SF or you want to be dynamic (some backup tool that learns columns every day and can handle changes without problems. Or there's a "connection wizard" where you specify which tables, which columns, what mapping... new field comes in - just rerun the wizard).
"Enterprise" will be specific to this particular customer. It contains everything "Partner" has but will also have description of current state of database tables etc. So you don't have to call "describe", you already have everything on the plate. You can use this to "consume" the WSDL file, generate your Java/PHP/C# classes out of it and interact with them in your program like any other normal object instead of crafting XML messages.
The downside is that if new field or new table is added - you won't know if your program doesn't call "describes". You'd need to generate fresh WSDL and consume it again and recompile your program...
Picking right one really depends what you need to do. ETL tools I've met generally are fine with "partner".
Is the "Web Services lookup" the right step
No idea, I've used Informatica, Azure Data Factory, Jitterbit, Talend... but no idea about this Pentaho thing. Just try it. If you pull data straight from SF tables without invoking any custom code (you can think of SF custom services like pulling data from stored procedures) - API version shouldn't matter that much. If you go < 41.0 I believe you won't see Individual object for example but I doubt you need to be on so much cutting edge.
Currently we have a data service that is consumed by various clients inside our organization; most of them use the PDF report to view the data. The problem we are facing is that the PDF generation is obsolete and built over a technology that is becoming hard to maintain.
So what we want to achieve now is basically two goals:
Encapsulate all data access in a SOA manner, publishing services for RAW data, PDF report and maybe some others like "Excel RAW"
Give our business users the ability to load and change the templates for the PDF reports, without asking for a "development" (basically that they can be as independent as possible)
There are two main issues; the report has to be "pretty", and by that I mean that our users ask for details such as image resolution, almost pixel accuracy for text/image positioning, and that sort of stuff. The server/library that we choose has to be able to achieve this requirement.
The other is that our technology stack currently is limited to a JAVA/LINUX platform, and while we could evaluate other platforms (for instance a product developed in .NET), a solution in Java EE/LINUX would be preferable.
Any suggestions?
P.S.: The data is stored in an Oracle database.
Certainly one prickly problem you have here is providing the ability to allow your users provide "pretty"/pixel-perfect report. Depending on what type of people your users are (technical staff / developers, business staff, general users) it may not be possible to find a system that allows you to offload significant work-effort to your users. It is just a hard domain.
If your reports are spreadsheet style, you might wish to examine systems like Business Objects, Coognos or Yellow Fin. These systems require a significant set up in terms of creating models to report against, but they can provide tools for users to design their own reports through a web interface. These systems usually stand separate to your main application though there are certainly ways to integrate them (though for exposing services to your own customers it might be difficult to get it to work exactly as you would like).
If your reports are document-style (as opposed to spreadsheet-style), you could look at Docmosis which is intended for integration with applications (please note I work for the company that created Docmosis). Docmosis allows your application to produce PDF reports from DOC/ODT/DOCX documents which act as templates for population from databases / Java objects / text etc. The templates can be provided/modified/uploaded by your users. It integrates with Java and linux environments so your technology environment is well suited. For many applications it provides automatically the layout based on the template that is desired.
With regards to the provision of SOA services to your users, it sound like a fine approach depending on the users you have (does a service approach provide them something easy to use?). Because your customers are internal I'm sure you already have determined the suitability of services.
Hope that helps.
I'm trying develop some app related to the Olympic Games.
Does anybody know how get info from the page www.london2012.com, like google does in results?
Does an API exist? Where can I find an API?
I'd suppose, maybe it could be done with a url like:
www.london2012.com?country=12
(This isn't real, just what I suppose an API might look like)
When I search "london olympics" for example, I see a "gadget" which shows some results, and I believe that these come from www.london2012.com. Does anyone know if that's true?
I'm not sure which programming language you are using, making it hard to provide an appropriate answer. I doubt www.london2012.com has produced an API just for access, so you will need to make queries (like you said in your post). For example, if you are using Python, you can use the urllib module to write your requests.
However, be warned. I just read over the www.london2012.com Terms of Service (http://www.london2012.com/terms-of-use/) , and you may not use this information for non-personal use.
It is possible though probably not allowed (see terms of service of the website).
You need your app to make a HTTP call to the page URL and parse the HTML response. Obviously the way to do it depends heavily on the language/technology you use, which you did not indicate in your question.
The Olympics use a system called ODF - Olympic Data Feed to distribute real time statistics from games to authorized parties, usually in XML format. These authorized parties consist of accredited world news organizations (so, yeah, google counts), Rights holding broadcasters (broadcasters that pay to have the rights to distrute Olympics content - NBC in US, BBC in UK, etc, etc) and international sports federations. They have dictionaries listed here - but you can't access it unless you are one of the authorized parties above. So perhaps going the python or some other web scraping route is best.
We are using only portal part of the liferay to show data from some of our applications. It is done thro liferay-ext. Is it possible to rip out the modules unused by us like communities, forums, blogs etc that we dont use. These seem to be hogging tomcat memory.
Thanks
Rama
You can deactivate some portlets that you don't use from ext, it should be available in liferay's administration guide or developer guide on https://www.liferay.com/documentation. Depending on the amount of work you're prepared to put into this you might also want to think about dimensions of your caches and other settings. However, I consider an additional piece of memory to be a lot cheaper than investing the time (again on each update) to trim down Liferay, if it's only for memory reasons.
However, if you "easily" trim Liferay through some means, please provide your findings in the Liferay forums as well - it might be worth feeding it back.
Web services and web APIs have managed to increase the accessibility of the information stored and catalogued on the internet. They have also opened up a vast array of enterprise power functionality for smaller thin client applications.
By taping into these services developers can provide functionality that would have taken them months perhaps years to set up. They can combine them into single applications that make life generally easier for its users.
Whether displaying information about the music being played, finding items of interest in the locale of the user or just simply tweeting and blogging from the same application - the possibilities are growing everyday.
I want to know about the most interesting or useful services that are out there, especially ones that most of us may not have heard about yet. Do you maintain an API or service? or do you have a clever mash up that provides even more benefits than the originals?
YQL - Yahoo provide a tool that lets you query many different API's across the web, even for sites that don't provide an API as such.
From the site:
The Yahoo! Query Language is an
expressive SQL-like language that lets
you query, filter, and join data
across Web services.
...
With YQL, developers can access and
shape data across the Internet through
one simple language, eliminating the
need to learn how to call different
APIs.
The World Bank API is pretty cool. Google uses it in search results. My favourite implementations are the cartograms at worldmapper.
(source: worldmapper.org)
It's very niche, but I happen to think the OpenCongress API is amazing.
Less niche: Google Translate has an API which will guess the language of something. You'd be AMAZED how frequently this comes in handy (even though it's not as tweakable as you'd like and is not trained on small samples).
I was just about to have a stab at using the SoundCloud API
I know many people who already use for sharing their musical masterpieces and its a pretty good site. Hopefully the api will be as well!
I like the RESTful API for weather.com. It's free and very useful for the new age of location-aware apps: https://registration.weather.com/ursa/xmloap/step1
It does require registration, but they don't spam you or anything - it's just to provide you a key to use the API.
Ah yes - here's another one I've been meaning to check out but haven't tried yet
The BBC offer a bunch of apis/feeds that look very promising
http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data
They include apis for accessing schedule data for both TV and Radio listings along with all kinds of news searches. It even looks like they'll be offering some sort of geo-location service soon so it will be interesting to see what that has to offer
Another interesting one for liberal brits! ;)
The Guardian news paper have their own api
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform
MuiscBrainz
Excellent service for music mashups.
Not so many knows that Last.FM initial database was scraped from this service.
The United States Postal Service offers a web service that does address standardization. Quite useful in reducing clutter and cleaning data before it gets put into your database.