I would like to call an Exchange 2010 web service from a remote client such as an iPhone to book a meeting room / to know if a meeting room is available etc.
Does anyone has an example available please?
Thanks a lot,
I don't know of any easy to follow sample so this is just some information that might help you get started anyway.
This page has a sample for creating an appointment in C#. So I'd say that's part of the answer, the other part is to find out how to use SOAP from your language of choice. This SO question discusses just this.
Related
Can someone show me a simple example of how to get data from web service on Magic software.
Assume that I have WSDL file and the function I need called "getData()"
Well, it's been awhile since you asked, and hopefully you found an answer by now. But, I have not perused this site before. Anyway, the manual that comes with Magic XPA has a manual, called "Mastering Magic". In Chapter 34 is a step-by-step "how to" for consuming web services.
We (some of the users) also have meetings weekly and you are welcome to join us, to get live walkthroughs for debugging details:
http://unipaasusers.blogspot.com/p/meeting-schedule.html
By and large, web services are very easy in Magic. Being able to automatically define XML files or XML BLOBS as data sources saves a lot of time. The problems tend to occur when there are syntax issues with the XML, which can be "fun"!
It is my understanding that TED likely is not looking at making a BlackBerry App. I have a few frameworks I've created already for parsing various types of API's/feeds/services and would like to know if there is a way for a third party developer to make a TED app. I've heard mention of an API via the Googles but cannot find it.
I know this is quite old, but I just came across it. I was searching for an API for TED Talks as well, but was unable to find one. They have announced that they'll open up the site with an API, but I don't know when.
Instead, I decided to use the XML RSS feed, which is easily parsable. It's only usable for the latest talks and you naturally can't do any server-side filtering, but if that's good enough for you, you should definitely check out the feed:
http://www.ted.com/talks/rss
There's also the higher definition version of that feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TedtalksHD?fmt=xml
There is an unofficial API for all ted talks details (gathered from youtube and ted.com)
its updated weekly with the data
http://market.mashape.com/bestapi/ted
supports:
get talks by name
get talks by speaker
get talks by description
get talks by transcript / search transcript
and looks like they publish more end-points from time to time
If you guys are still looking for something, I just open-sourced about 5400 hundred TED talks (TEDx, TED, TEDEd). Check it out and build something cool.
https://github.com/saranyan/TED-talks
What I am looking for is a tool that easily or automatically sends coldfusion error messages to their system.
Then I can use the web-based interface, to manage priorities, track who fixed what and so forth.
But I want to use this to help us deal with errors better, but also to show the importance of a bug tracking system to my fellow works.
System Requirements: Apache, Windows, Coldfusion 8 Standard, Sql Server 2005.
Financial Requirements: Free or Open Source
Goal Or Purpose: To encourage my fellow workers to want and use a bug tracking system.
Does this re-write make more sense?
Thanks
Craig
Wiki has a list of issue tracking software, maybe this list could help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems
You may be able to find a hosted service and use either email or web services to create the ticket using onError. With that said, a simple issue tracking app could be created for your site using the same DB used to drive the content. 2 or 3 tables would take care of the data storage and you're already using CF so the application layer is already there.
HTH.
I have been heavily using this type of a setup for several years by email only, and the last 3 years with a Bug Tracking Software.
I must say, the bug tracking software has made my life so much more peaceful. Nothing is left, forgotten, or slips through the cracks. It's easy to find trends in errors, and remember "all the times" it happened.
Our setup is like this:
1) Coldfusion + Appropriate framework with error reporting - It doesn't matter what you use. I have used Fusebox extensively and am making the transition to ColdBox. Both are very capable, in addition to Mach-II, FW/1, Model-Glue, etc. The key part you have to find in them is their ability to catch "onError", usualy in the application CFC.
2) Custom OnError Script - Wherever an error occurs, you want to capture the maximum amount of information about that error and email it in. What we do is, when an error occurs, we log the user out with a message of "oops, log in again". Before logging them out, the application captures the error and emails it to Fogbugz. Along with it, at the top we include the CGI variables for the IP address, browser being used, etc. Over time you will find the things you need to add.
3) Routing in Fogbugz. A 2 user version of Fogbugz is free, and hosted online. There are two main ways to submit bugs. One is to email one in at a time. So if an error happens 2000 times, you get 2000 emails, and 2000 cases. Not always the best to link them together, etc. They have a feature called BugzScout, which is essentially an HTTP address that you do a form post to with cfform with all of the same information you would have put into the email. There's plenty of documentation on this and something I've always wanted to get around to. I had a scenario of 2000 emails for the first time happen a few weeks ago so I'll be switching over to this.
Hope that helps. Share what you ended up doing and why so we all can learn too!
I'm surprised no one mentioned LighthousePro (http://lighthousepro.riaforge.org). Open source - 100% free - and ColdFusion. As the author I'm a bit biased though. :)
Hard question to answer not knowing what kind of restrictions are there? Do you have any permissions to install anything? Also most bug-tracking systems require some kind of database support.
I have a suggestion. You can put in place a basic bug-tracking system, that just allows people to create tickets, and allows you/someone else to close it.
More Windows based tools are mentioned here
Good open-source bug tracking / issue tracking sofware for Windows
Any reason why coldfusion specifically?
I really like Fogbugz from the makers of Stack Overflow. For one user it's quite reasonably priced. I enter some bugs manually and have others emailed in.
A lot of bug tracking software will expose SOAP methods for entering data into them.
For example, we used Axosoft's OnTime and that exposed some WSDL pages that I consumed in my application. I was told that Jira did as well.
There are few in CF411 list: Bug Tracking/Defect Tracking/Trouble Ticket/Help Desk Tools Written in CFML
We use HopToad. There is another bug-tracking app called LightHouse that integrates with HopToad so you can easily create a [bug] ticket from an incoming exception. HopToad has an API of which there are many clients, you want the CF based one:
http://github.com/timblair/coldfusion-hoptoad-notifier
Even if you dont use HopToad and you end up using a different service or roll your own, if you needed to write your own API client you could leverage the code or pattern(s) of the above HopToad client.
A lot of good information from everyone, and I really do appreciate the efforts given. But not the answer i was looking for. Which maybe means, that what i want does not exist, yet.
So i may have to roll my own solution...Or maybe integrate with another existing app...
Thank You all.
Go bounty!
This question has earned me a tumbleweed badge (7 views in 7 days!), which is somehow a strong confirmation that Navision has a very limited market share, which - I suspect - should be a confirmation Navision is neither all that great piece of software...
But hey... that's what we got as a back-end, so I am ready to fight with this. :-O
If there is some daring navision developer who is able to shed light onto this... the bounty is there for you! :)
Original Post
I have recently implemented a rather complex e-commerce system that interacts with a legacy back-end based on Navision 5. So far the exchange of data between the two platform has happened via XML files, but this method is quite clumsy and very much prone to mishaps.
Our needs are:
To expose certain elements of the business logic of each platform to the other one (for example: "what's the total amount ever purchased by this customer?", "what are the products currently on offer?", "how many new customers have registered on the website?", etc...).
To have mechanisms of feed-back / validation for the various transactions (for example: "Here's the a new order from customer X" ... "Ok, got it, the order will now start to be processed" ... "Ok, copy that, bye!").
If possible, avoid playing around with files, but keeping all of this happening in terms of calls/ports/services...
The most natural way I could think of would be to integrate the two systems via webservice, but Navision 5 does not support this natively. So I did my "due diligence" and found a few things on MSDN including this article and this other one.
According to these articles it should not be that difficult to create a webservice on Navision 5, but when I suggested this solution to the team in charge of the legacy system, they told us that it is "pure theory" and they do not know of anybody who ever implemented it.
I have no reason to doubt their word, but mileage can vary... and I thought that maybe in the SO community there are professionals from other countries who actually implemented something similar and are available to share their experience.
So, my question is two-folded:
Is there anybody who has tried this at home and would be available to share a bit on what have been the greatest difficulties, if the final result is reliable, if they think the outcome is worth the effort, etc... ?
Is there anybody who faced a similar problem but solved it with a different approach and that would be available to present their solution ("I never did it myself, but if I had to do it I would do it like this..." type of answers are also welcome)?
Thank you in advance for your time! :)
I too will chime in with a not-too helpful answer about Nav 6 :)
I've just completed a project using Nav 6. Suprisingly, the webservices are VERY easy to expose and consume. It's really a trivial matter to go find a object in the webservices interface and tick a box to tell it to expose itself.
Unsuprisingly, the webservices don't work as you'd expect, you have to often use some trial-and error to get objects and properties to persist, as it's really touchy as to the sequence of events you use to save and object. And each object seems to work slightly differently. eg: To create a customer, I eventually found out that you have to create and save a blank customer, massage this new record with a codeunit, then fetch the record and then write the customer's attributes and save again. I expected to just create a new customer(), set the attributes and save in one quick swoop.
I guess you're not too keen on upgrading to Nav6, but off the top of my head, Here is how you could simulate web services:
Sharepoint can already consume and expose webservices, so that tier isn't a problem.
Nav 5 doesn't have them 'naturally', but you could cook up your own program that acts as a webservice 'broker' - you're already getting info into and out of nav, via mostly XML. You could build this broker to take input as the xml files and massage them to use in a webservice call. You could even forgo the XML and write and read directly from the Db, as all the Nav info is stored there anyway. So here's what I'm thinking:
NAV <-> SQL SERVER <-> New 'broker' webservice <-> Sharepoint
Or if you already have the NAV API down pat and want to resuse your XML:
NAV <-> XML files <-> New 'broker' webservice <-> Sharepoint
If you are using XML and use filewatchers, the latency shouldn't be too bad, usually filewatchers pick up on a drop or change in milliseconds.
Hmm, but I'm thinking you are probably supposed to use BizTalk for stuff like this:
NAV <-> BizTalk <-> Sharepoint
But I don't know how easy it would be to set up BizTalk to communicate with Nav. I'll bet that it's pretty straighforward to get comms working, but this is speculation.
In any case, I don't know how helpful this post is, but maybe it gives you a few ideas to go with.
Cheers,
Lance
Where I work, we were able to use one of the web services from NAV 6 to integrate with SharePoint, so you can look up a customer or record and show it in a web part in SharePoint. I know your question is about NAV 5 in particular, but I have only seen this working on NAV 6. And I wasn't the developer who worked on this, so I don't have any more specifics I'm afraid.
Did you try asking on mibuso.com? They're much more Navision-focused.
When you say expose business logic, does this include executing AL code (e.g. a CodeUnit)? If you only need to perform queries against the database you could use NODBC & System.Data.Odbc or the CFront .NET API. Either of these can easily be wrapped using a .NET web service, and both support the native NAV database. To pass messages back you would still need to use COM, as described in the first article you mention.
Any of the above are entirely possible, and relatively easy depending on your proficiency in .NET, COM and NAV.
The second article you linked to describes using the NAS. I'm no expert on this, but I think this might require a special license granule. Before spending time implementing anything its worth checking whether your license includes the NAS, CFront or NODBC.
You can actually do a "technical upgrade" of NAV 5 to NAV 2009 and then use the native webservices. Meaning replacing the exe-files and the entire application (but not the objects, which will still be version 5), and a couple of other tricks. But it works, and thus you have 2009-webservice-functionality on your NAV 5 :-)
For the benefit of anyone googling this, if you're still on Navision 6 with the native database, a good way of connecting it is via the windows message queue.
You can write your own web service that puts XML requests into the queue and then wait for the reply to pop up. On the Navision side, you have one clients that pulls the queue and puts answers into the reply queue. There's a special non-GUI client called NAS for that.
I've been using this approach for 15 years to connect booking engines to out Navision back end. It works very well and has the advantage that you can peek at requests before they reach Navision, so you can protect your back end from too many or faulty requests.
The only problem with this approach is that the COMMIT command within Navision is super expensive. It's difficult to serve high volumes of requests. As soon as the back end needs committing, you are down to just a few requests per second. This may be fine for low volume.
For high volume you need to implement caching or getting some of the business logic out. For me it was getting hit by price comparison websites, so here the solution is serve those from web services written in Python and only pass on the requests if someone buys something...
Scenario: old legacy code in rpg have to consume data from a new web service
I think in a new stored procedure implemented in any language to act like a proxy but sure there are better options
Some options i have seen is http://www.rpg-xml.com/ (third party propietary)
or using Java stored procedures with DB2 XML Extender
Thank you!!!
Both are really good options. It really depends on your expertise in your team. If all you know is RPG, use the RPG solution. If you have someone with .NET or Java experience, then use that.
If you have more questions related to this, there is a great community of developers that can help on the Web400 mailing list.