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
Comentários (8)
Nice Article
I've been playing around with this feature - it looks promising untill you need to use the buildws utility. <br /> I built a webservice in .NET using C# (generating a .asmx). Plain and simple - just a void operation. <br /> Then Event Studio is able to retrieve the signature of the webservice but cannot run the webservice, probably because it's treated as a 'wrapped' webservice. Hence I've tried the buildws utility but it never seems to be able to generate the correct stubs for the webservice. It always complains about enum (something which is generated for the classes by the buildws utility - through the Apache AXIS wsdl2java emitter) - that it should not be used as an identifier since it's a keyword since jdk 1.5. And off course at run-time cognos cannot deserialize the operation. <div> </div> Actually, I don't find any information on the buildws utility. Has this feature been tested in a non-Java, non-WSIF environment? <br /> Is there more information available on how to get this working? It seems promising...
Hi there
I guess you are not yet using Cognos 10?
We found this issue and have fixed it for C10, but you can patch your version by modifying the buildws.xml file in bin.
this file is an ant build script and if you add the xml attributes source="1.4" target="1.5" to the <javac target="target" this="this" should="should" resolve="resolve" the="the" issue.="issue." Let="Let" me="me" know="know" how="how" it="it" goes.="goes." Nick="Nick"></javac>
Apologies... my previous empty post was supposed to be a response to the buildws question.
This issue is fixed in C10, but if you are having the issue with a previous release you can always patch it by altering the file buildws.xml (renamed to es_build_ws_objs.xml in C10)
the file is an ant build script and contains a javac call to compile classes generated to support the ws. this should contain the attribute "target" that should be at 1.5 (to avoid the enum clash) leave the other attributes as they are.
...etc</javac>
Apologies... my previous empty posts were supposed to be a response to the buildws question I think they contained xml which is unsupported. <br /> This issue is fixed in C10, but if you are having the issue with a previous release you can always patch it by altering the file buildws.xml (renamed to es_build_ws_objs.xml in C10) <br /> the file is an ant build script and contains a javac xml tag to compile classes generated to support the ws. this should contain the attribute "target" that should be at 1.5 (to avoid the enum clash)
FYI if you have issues where you get deserialization errors after you follow all the steps, you may have a wsdl that uses an xsd:import. the current implementation cant cope with this. <br /> Sorry were working to get an enhancement approved
Hi All, <div> </div> Please help me on the below two issues on cognos evnet studio. Would be appriciated your answers with earlist and send to my email ( sekhara81@gmail.com) <div> </div> -Is Cognos Event Studio to handle a return value via Web service that would indicate success or failure? <div> </div> -Can Cognos Event Studio pass complex data types for the parameters or can it only pass all the parameters as strings or native types? <div> </div> Thanks <br /> Chandra
Hi there <br /> No event studio does not read a response, an exception from the webservice would cause the webservice task to fail. <br /> complex types can be handled, this requires a build script to be run to generate a suppport jar server side as mentioned in the article.