Using WebFOCUS Web Services

In this section:

WebFOCUS Web Services allow you to develop applications in the .NET or Java environments and perform WebFOCUS functionality from it. A business can pass parameters from its own application to WebFOCUS and retrieve output in the form of a formatted report or data. In WebFOCUS reports, input is in the form of parameters and output is in the form of a formatted report.

Businesses benefit from Web Services because of their accessibility and efficiency. A WebFOCUS Web Service allows businesses to use their own customized front-end interfaces to implement a variety of WebFOCUS reporting capabilities.

WebFOCUS provides the following Web Services products:

WebFOCUS Web Services Enablement, also known as the Publish option, can present WebFOCUS reports as Web Services operations. It allows external applications built with Web Services supported languages (such as C++, C#, VB.NET, Java, and Flash Action Script) to integrate the report output. It also includes a set of generic Web Services operations that allow an application to integrate some basic WebFOCUS functionality.
WebFOCUS Web Services Adapter, also known as the Consume option, consumes Web Services information and incorporates it as a data source. A Web Service that is created and deployed with any Web Services authoring tool can be accessed directly by the WebFOCUS Reporting Server and manipulated as though it were relational data.

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What Can You Do Through a WebFOCUS Web Service?

You can do the following through a WebFOCUS Web Service:

Run WebFOCUS reports.
Determine the parameters for a report.
Retrieve metadata information.
Retrieve the application list.
Retrieve Domain information.
Retrieve the report list.
Domain administration (for example, creating report folders).
Managed Reporting security administration (for example, creating users).
Pass a .NET data set to a WebFOCUS report.

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The WebFOCUS WSDL Creation Utility

WebFOCUS provides a WSDL creation utility, which describes the capabilities available through a WebFOCUS Web Service. A WSDL file is an XML document that defines the input parameters for WebFOCUS Web Service functions, the expected output, and the method for calling each function. The WebFOCUS WSDL utility creates a file needed to call one or more WebFOCUS Web Services.

.NET or Java programmers can use this to develop their own applications.

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The WebFOCUS Web Services Adapter

WebFOCUS accesses a business' data sources with data adapters for Relational Database Management Systems such as DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, and so on. However, some businesses can only access certain data using a homegrown Web Service, or can only access external data using a Web Service. In these cases, WebFOCUS can use its Web Services adapter to call Web Services. The WebFOCUS Web Services adapter allows you to pass parameters from WebFOCUS to a Web Service and access data from the applications defined by the Web Service.

The WebFOCUS Web Services adapter allows ad hoc reporting against data from Web Service applications. You can join Web Services to other Web Services and other data sources. For more information about joining data sources, see the Creating Reports With WebFOCUS Language manual.

This adapter can read a Web Service as a source during the creation of a Data Warehouse or DataMart using DataMigrator.

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