Needing to Access one of HTTP, SOAP, LDAP as data provider

general discussion
1

We’re on BO 6.5 and planning up upgrade to XI in the next few months.

We have a common API (written in JDBC) for running queries against our corporate LDAP. Rather than storing LDAP data locally in a database, we were looking at the possibility of querying live LDAP data and linking it into other report data. The problem seems to be in getting to the LDAP data.

Please correct me where I’m wrong.

It doesn’t appear that Business Objects supports a direct connection to LDAP as a data provider (only for authentication purposes). I’d have to purchase some sort of ODBC to LDAP bridge to facilitate this type of connectivity.

This drives me to the common API option, where we have 3 interface options with the API: HTTP, SOAP, or LDAP. LDAP still doesn’t work here, and I have also not found anything on BO’s ability to use SOAP as a data provider (other than in some references to XML).

Buying 3rd party software is not an option to make this work. Can anyone think of an out-of-the-box option that will work in this case, or are we just going to have to store the data locally and deal w/ it for reporting purposes?

danglet :us: (BOB member since 2004-08-04)

2

Moved from Designer to General Discussion.

Anita Craig :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-17)

3

This post might be helpful:

https://bobj-board.org/t/48982

eepjr24 :us: (BOB member since 2005-09-16)

4

Not sure if this helps, but Crystal reports versions 10, XI, and XI R2 include a native driver to XML data streams, including XML files, HTTP post/get reponses (a.k.a. REST), and SOAP web services. This can be used in an XI R2 reporting system side-by-side with your existing BOBJ/Webi reports.

snagoski :canada: (BOB member since 2004-12-13)