I’m working on some script that would retrieve data from universes. I’m using RESTful on BO 4.1 platform and I was able to retrieve most information I need except object definition. I mean I would like to retrieve object properties (those we can see on Object Properties window in Universe Designer) like Select, Where, and so one. Normally if you are retrieving universe details via REST you can see outline with items and folders but there are only basic information like ID, Name, Type and Data type. There are no details…
Unfortunately, Java is not my strong side: I do .Net development. Would you recommend a good place to start with JAVA SDK (a resource with a good manual or detailed example). I don’t need to do much with it, just to get XML or JSON (or any format) file with all universe objects. I can do the rest in C#.
Can anyone of you guys help me with the understanding of RESTful API’s? I don’t quite understand why its used or how. Brand new to the RESTful arena and any guidance you guys could give would be immensely helpful!
REST (Representational State Transfer) is a method for communicating with a server over HTTP. The BO REST APIs allow for programs to interact with a BO server in a similar way as the Java and .NET APIs.
The primary differences are:
[list][:ef296ff382]No local installation of any client libraries is needed to use the APIs
[:ef296ff382]All usage of the APIs is done with HTTP GET/PUT/POST/DELETE calls. You send a HTTP request with specially formatted parameters and/or body, and receive an HTTP response with the requested information.
[*:ef296ff382]When using a traditional SDK (Java or .NET), you are writing native code that performs certain actions. You might call a method that returns a standard Java List, containing IInfoObject objects. In REST, everything is text. Depending on what you are doing, you may need to construct an XML string to be passed in a POST call, then retrieve another XML string back which needs to be parsed so you can extract the information that you want.[/list]
The biggest push for REST comes from the fact that it is language and platform agnostic – as long as your program can write and read over HTTP, it can interact with the REST server. You can also interact with REST interactively (sorta) using browser-based REST clients.
The downside (in my opinion) is that it requires a lot more code. Rather than using native libraries, you need to manage fairly low-level data translation tasks, such as writing and parsing XML. It also makes debugging more difficult, since there are many more runtime errors than compile errors.
Fundamentally, the REST APIs perform the same function as native libraries, but do it in a very different way.
Unfortunately, you can’t. That capability is not in the RESTful SDK. You would have to use the Java Semantic Layer SDK to get that for .unx universes or the COM-based Designer SDK for .unv universes (there are some tricks to using this SDK, let me know if you need more info).
Yes. The RESTful SDK will give you info about parameters in the report and will also provide a base OpenDocument URL you can use to export a report in a specific format.
Since we are using REST service which in turn are HTTP requests, can I use excel macro to do this? Excel macro has capability to raise GET and POST requests.
I was able to call REST APIs through excel macro.
Here is a a small POC or a tool using excel macro, which gets WEBI report’s
data provider details like , names of the DPs, the objects used in the DPs and their definition along with the query the DP generates.
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