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Hi I'm Nick Mann from the Event Management Framework team and I want to talk about something we've been working on recently, a powerful way to integrate Cognos with external applications via web services using Event Studio.
What is Event Studio?
Event Studio is a tool for administrators to design an agent that allows you to conditionally harvest BI data and act on it. One of the actions or tasks that you can perform with the data is calling an external web service.
Event Studio is a tool for administrators to design an agent that allows you to conditionally harvest BI data and act on it. One of the actions or tasks that you can perform with the data is calling an external web service.
External web service
First, create a web service or identify a web service that you wish to call. If you want an example and have eclipse, here is a good tutorial. If you are going to reference an external web service remember that the domain has to be in the valid domains list in the configuration tool.
First, create a web service or identify a web service that you wish to call. If you want an example and have eclipse, here is a good tutorial. If you are going to reference an external web service remember that the domain has to be in the valid domains list in the configuration tool.
Create an Agent in Event Studio.
The condition filter can be a simple 1=1 and add a web service task and paste in the WSDL URL for the web service. i.e. from the above example http://localhost:5753/axis_test/services/Converter?wsdl. Now internally event studio will use WSIF to parse the WSDL received from the URL and attempt to present the web service arguments to you as a list. At this point you can choose to enter literal data or use the data gathered by the event. Save the agent and then run it and you're done. See the Event Studio User Guide and samples for more guidance.
Complex arguments
If your web service takes complex types, for example if the web service is "wrapped", then the complex type information must be available to WSIF. There is a buildws script available in Cognos bin directory that will process the WSDL URL and build the appropriate support classes. See the Event Studio User Guide for more information.
Troubleshooting
- Remember to add the domain for the web service host to the valid domains in configuration.
- If the argument types are complex or wrapped, build the WSIF support classes first using the script in bin directory (and rename the resulting jar to avoid name clashes).
- Check your firewalls.
Video Demo
Here is a demonstration of the use of web service calls in an Event Studio agent. It tells the story of using Event Studio to discover and act on branches of a shop with low sales.
Event Studio help
