Looking for a Report Designer that allows connection to a RESTful webservice

Question

Hi,

I'm looking for a Report Designer that will allow me to connect to a RESTful webservice. Ideally I would like one that has a royalty-free End-User Report Designer. WE will be hosting it in an ASP.NET web site. So something compatable with that would be ideal ;)

We used to use Data Dynamics Active Reports. However this doesn't allow connections to webservices.

Any help, very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Crafty

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you mean by asking for a report generator that can connect to a web service.

Web services aren't something you can report on. They're just a source of data. What do you want to connect to and what data are you expecting to get back?

The problem with RESTful web services is you don't know what you're going to get back (there's no schema as with a DB table).

The good thing about RESTful web services is you're probably going to get back some XML, and the Active Reports product you mention seems to do things with XML files.

"ActiveReports for .NET 3.0 supports many XML-based files for data input."

Cam you call the web services for the information you need and squirrel it away in some files (or a DB) first?

Or are you in essence asking for something that can query a RESTful web service in some reasonably complex way and return the results of the query in some structured way that a report generator can then consume?

Do you have specific RESTful web services in mind, and if so do you know what format they will return data in? Then your question is really about report generators that can handle that returned format, perhaps.

Or something else and I've missed the point?

Answer 2

Paul,

Thanks for you answer, I'll investigate what you mentioned about using the XML support in the Datadynamics reports. It might not be possible to query a RESTful webservice. I wasn't sure, so wanted to check really.

RESTful webservices use something called a WADL file which means "Web Application Description Language". It's the equivalent to the WSDL file used in more traditional SOAP style web services. I believe there is also something called ATOM pub, which is another description language. So i was thinking that someone must have written something that allows you to query on one of those description laguages?

I've just found that the Telerik Innovative WYSIWYG Report Designer supports web services. Doesn't mention anthing about RESTful ones. It does say "You can databind Telerik Reporting to Business Objects, XML, Web Services and any ADO.NET datasource." So maybe there is hope.

If anyone knows of one that works with RESTful webservices i'd still really like to hear from you.

Thanks Crafty

Answer 3

Hey Paul,

As it turns out you were right. You can use the XML side of DataDynamics Active Reports to connect to a restful web service.

Instead of pointing the source to a physical file on the drive:

c:\MyXMLFile.xml

you can point it to a restful webservice such as one i created:

http://localhost:2734/Customer/34?format=xml

This works exactly the same way as a local XML file. Just as long as the RESTful webservice actually returns the xml using the correct Content-Type:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: ASP.NET Development Server/9.0.0.0
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:30:22 GMT
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Connection: Close

Then it's just a case of using XPath and all the usual Stuff you get with XML to create Headers and footers etc.