crystal report web service operations - web-services

How can I use the Crystal Report web service operations listed by the web service?
I created a visual studio web project and created a webservice for the crystal reports. http://localhost:52567/CrystalReportsWebSite1/CrystalReport1Service.asmx it displays a list of "supported operations"
CrystalReport1Service
The following operations are supported. For a formal definition, please review the Service Description.
DoParameterPrompting
DrillGraph
DrillPartGraph
Export
FindGroup
FindText
GetAvailableExportFormats
GetGroupLevelData
GetInitialReportParts
GetLastPageNumber
GetPage
GetParamPromptingInfo
GetPromptParameterFields
GetReportEngineType
GetReportInfo
GetReportParts
GetTotaller
NavigateToReportPart
Refresh
ResolveParamPromptingResult
TestReport
I followed the numerous examples online and they have worked flawlessly to serve and consume a crystal report using a web service. But none have shown how to use these methods and I cannot figure it out.
My main objective is to get the parameter names for the report, and it seems these operations could accomplish that.
I'm still learning about services and such, so I may be way off in my understanding of what these operations are for.

Related

Does anyone know how to retrieve the list of tasks in Camunda 8, without using tasklist?

I am currently evalauting Camunda, having previously used version 7 in the past which seems to be significantly more open source than version 8.
I am aware that tasklist and an official tasklist-api exist, however they are only permitted during development and testing without a license.
In Bernd Rücker's medium post How Open is Camunda Platform 8?, there is a section:
A path to production with source-available software
...
Additionally, you will need to find solutions to replace the tools you cannot use.
Tasklist
You will need to implement your own task management solution based on using workers subscribing to Zeebe as described in the docs. That also means you have to build your own persistence to allow task queries, as the Tasklist API is part of the Tasklist component and is not free for production use.
I have tried to search the zeebe source for any hints, but the only job/task related APIs I seem to be able to find are:
activateJobs
completeJob
I do not believe that these could be the endpoints that tasklist uses as the jobs have to be manually claimed by user interaction from the UI.
Does anyone know how this is achieved?
Your own zeebe exporter allows you to export any events the engine produces, such as user task state updates. You could store this information in a data sink of your choice and and implement an API on top of it.
See, e.g. https://camunda.com/blog/2019/05/exporter-part-1/

WebService Task in Camunda

In Camunda BPM designer, I couldn't find activity and for invoking a REST or SOAP based webservices. Is it only possible to invoke through wiring code? How do I pass payload to the code if it needs to be written using java code.
Regards,
Phani
You can invoke a Webservice inside a bpmn.
You can create a Task of type Service, and choose in Properties/Details/Implementation: Connector.
Next you configure Connector properties, setting:
Connector Id: http-connector (for rest json webservices) and
Input Parameters:
url (e.g. http://localhost:8080/client?id=12
method GET/POST
headers type MAP: Accept application/json...
You receive the webservice response as Process Variables, configuring the Output parameters as follows :
response, type text, value ${response}
returnCode, type text, value ${statusCode}
Hope this helps you
For start: please note that camundas claim is "developer friendly". It's never been the goal of camunda components to just "click together" a working process. If you are looking for such a solution, you should a) have a look at the zero coding myth and b) maybe choose another tool.
That being said, check out the camunda-connect framework, introduced with 7.2, it should do what you need (though it involves xml coding).
For all but the most simple SOAP / REST calls, you'll need to go through java code. This takes a little getting used to when moving from other BPM platforms with extensive built-in webservice support. But trust me, java code is the way to go - import of transform / WSDL in the process definiton becomes such a holy mess.
I've written two CXF-based examples: soap-cxf-service and soap-cxf-server-start which will get you started.
I recommend creating a maven artifact per webservice and just adding the required services as standard maven dependencies for your process project.

Create a SharePoint workflow programmatically

I am working on a copy of a SharePoint 2007 site for a client.
I would like to be able to automate as much of the update process as I can with minimal disruption to the client's system when the updates are ready for production.
To that effect, I was wondering if anyone knows how to automate creating a SharePoint workflow (created using SPD 2007) in another SharePoint server/site.
Perhaps I haven't searched enough yet, but I have not discovered if there is a way to do this with web services, which I believe would be my preference.
I do not believe I have the ability to use STSadm on this, as the hosting for the SharePoint site is separate.
I think I can export the workflows in a personal web package and I'll admit, I haven't experimented with this yet on workflows, but my current experience with other exports, such as lists, is that guids seem to get messed up between sites. Even if this is not an issue, I'm not sure if there is a way of automating the import process (without STSadm).
I'm hoping not to have to work through a long list of manual procedures (that could accidentally get missed) when implementing these changes on the target production site.
My preference is to be able to create some sort of update batch or application that will make the changes quickly and that I can test before implementing on the production system.
This entails quite a few things, but for now, I'd like to focus on getting workflows into the target system.
Any suggestions on where to get started would be welcome.
SharePoint Designer workflows are not portable between sites. (Reference) 1
For your situation, I would recommend taking the Visual Studio workflow route. Take a look at this tutorial: How to Create Custom SharePoint Workflows in Visual Studio 2008. The key for you is how you will associate it to lists.
The other option is to create a custom Workflow Activity (2007 has less options that 2010). You will still have to create the workflow using SharePoint Designer and add your custom activity to it in each site.
1. Yes, there is the "hack way" of trying to do it by copying the XML and changing the GUIDs... but it is error prone and difficult.
SharePoint 2010 gives more flexibility for workflows and thus the first #Kit Menke statement isn't true for readers using SP2010 (i see that this is tagged as sharepoint2007, but i'm making it clear for readers using SP2010)
However, if you publish a workflow template to a SharePoint site
collection, you can download that template as a WSP file and then
deploy it to other site collections.
Read more about Workflow deployment process (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

What GUI tool can I use for building applications that interact with multiple APIs?

My company uses a lot of different web services on daily bases. I find that I repeat same steps over and over again on daily bases.
For example, when I start a new project, I perform the following actions:
Create a new client & project in Liquid Planner.
Create a new client Freshbooks
Create a project in Github or Codebasehq
Developers to Codebasehq or Github who are going to be working on this project
Create tasks in Ticketing system on Codebasehq and tasks in Liquid Planner
This is just when starting new projects. When I have to track tasks, it gets even trickier because I have to monitor tasks in 2 different systems.
So my question is, is there a tool that I can use to create a web service that will automate some of these interactions? Ideally, it would be something that would allow me to graphically work with the web service API and produce an executable that I can run on a server.
I don't want to build it from scratch. I know, I can do it with Python or RoR, but I don't want to get that low level.
I would like to add my sources and pass data around from one service to another. What could I use? Any suggestions?
Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator lets you build WebServices through an Eclipse based GUI.
It is a commercial product, and I happen to work for the company that makes it. In some respects I think it might be overkill for you, as it's really an enterprise-level data mapping tool for mapping disparate data sources (web services, databases, xml files, COBOL) to a common model, as opposed to a simple web services builder, and it doesn't really support your github bits, anymore than normal Eclipse plugins would.
That said, I do believe there are Mantis plugins for github to do task tracking, and I know there's a git plugin for Eclipse that works really well (jgit).
Couldn't you simply use Selenium to execute some of this tasks for you? Basically as long as you can do something from the browser, Selenium will also be able to do. Selenium comes with a language called "selenese", so you can even use it to programmatically create an "API" with your tasks.
I know this is a different approach to what you're originally looking for, but I've been using selenium for a number of tasks, and found it's even good to execute ANT tasks or unit tests.
Hope this helps you
What about Apache Camel?
Camel lets you create the Enterprise Integration Patterns to implement routing and mediation rules in either a Java based Domain Specific Language (or Fluent API), via Spring based Xml Configuration files or via the Scala DSL. This means you get smart completion of routing rules in your IDE whether in your Java, Scala or XML editor.
Apache Camel uses URIs so that it can easily work directly with any kind of Transport or messaging model such as HTTP, ActiveMQ, JMS, JBI, SCA, MINA or CXF Bus API together with working with pluggable Data Format options.

Using MS Access to return on-demand reports in a web server?

I have built a MS Access 2007 application that can create reports files in various formats (PDF, XLS, CSV, XML).
I would like to allow the creation of these reports to be accessible from a web page where users would just click on a link and get a download of the report produced by my Access application.
I would like to keep it simple and I'm not interested at this stage in rewriting the data processing in .Net. I'd just like to find a way to automate the creation of the user report to return a file that can be downloaded.
In essence, my Access application would act as a web service of some kind.
The web server is IIS on Windows 2003.
Any pointers or ideas would be welcome. I'm not well versed in IIS administration or ASP pages.
The first quick and dirty method i could think of would be to call Access from a shell and pass it a few parameters to open as read only and run a macro.
That macro would have to pull it's report parameters from somewhere (possibly env variables), run the report and save it as Excel, PDF or whatever to a unique name. To du this you'll need to pass the report name, a unique request id, and a param array to handle multiple (or none) parameters.
Last but not least your Access macro / VBA Sub will need to shut access down.
This isnt a good solution as starting one copy of Access per request isn't really advisable though.
Another option is to have start Access on the server with a VBA sub that starts on opening. This sub could poll a directory for requests that are written by your web server. Then on receiving a request run a report and write it to somewhere. Again you'd have to base this around a unique request ID.
I'm not really sure which "solution" would be better.... Access as a command line report generator or Access as a batch reporting service. Both would be nasty, but would get you over the hump until you can migrate to a reporting service.
This is kind of a round about way to achieve what you're asking. You can utilize the free version of sql server express 2005 or 2008 advance edition which includes the reporting services component. Using the report generation tools you can convert your access 2007 reports to sql server reports and have those reports feed off of the access database. You can also go to the extent of migrating the database to sql server as well if you wanted to go that route. Reporting services will generate pdf, xls, csv and xml formats as output for your reports and you can generate those reports just by passing the parameters in the url to the server which will return your report in the format requested.
Link to sql server 2008 express advanced edition:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/download/
If you do not wish to rewrite in .Net, how about Classic ASP and VBScript? VBScript has a lot in common with VBA, so it should not take long create something usable, and there is a great deal of help available for ASP and VBScript on the internet. For example, a simple search returned this method of creating a PDF with Adobe from ASP:
Creating a PDF with ASP