BIRT,Web,Services,Data,Source, technology BIRT Web Services Data Source

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The full version of this report, including screen shots and source code, in full colour pdf is available for free download at http://www.BIRTReporting.comOne of the most frequent questions I have been asked through my work with the BIRT User Group UK and BIRTReporting.com is “how can you use web services as data sources within BIRT”.This seems to stem from the fact that one of the data source options within the BIRT designer is the Web Service data source, but there seems to be little information out there on the net to really walk people through how to create an actual example.This project, which you can follow step by step, aims to correct that.In this example we are going to create a report which reads a list of email addresses from a source database. So this might be your customer or prospects database and you may be using a report like this to periodically “clean” the list of invalid email addresses.For each email address that we read we want to use an online web service to check that the email address is valid and return a graphical result. The web service we are going to use actually returns a textual result, so whilst this would have been good enough, I wanted to go one step further and include the additional principle of dynamic images just to add a little spice to the mix!THE BASIC REPORTIf you have been following my previous guides you will already know how to create a basic listing report. If you don’t then this guide is probably not the best place to start!The underlying table I am using for this is a SQL Server Express 2008 R2 hosted table which contains just 2 columns, a name and an email address. I created the table manually and populated it with some real email addresses and some made up ones. Note that I have based many previous guides on full SQL server or Oracle, but recently readers mentioned to me that they didn’t have full copies of either and asked if I had some examples that work over MySQL. Well in short I don’t, but the express versions of SQL server are available for free download from Microsoft, so if you want to follow these guides to the letter then go get one of those. If not you could always adapt and have a go at doing this over any database of your choice.Here is a screenshot of the finished report, but we will get on to the good stuff in a moment. For now just create the basic report that lists the names and email addresses from the database.Naturally you can use grids and headings as you see fit to make the report look nice. ADDING A WEB SERVICE DATA SOURCEOK now for the good bit. We are going to add a publically available web service as a data source to our report.Do the usual and right click on data sources, selecting New Data Source and this time look for the Web Services Data Source option – click it, name it and click Next.Next use the following two entries in the WSDL URL or Location field and the SOAP End Point field. http://www.webservicex.net/ValidateEmail.asmx?wsdlhttp://www.webservicex.net/ValidateEmail.asmxIf you don’t know what these terms mean then take a look at the following article on Wikipedia which provides a good introduction to web services.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAPADDING A WEB SERVICE DATA SETNow create another data set in the usual manner. Select the Web services data source as the data source and give your data sent an appropriate name.On the next screen expand the options till you find the IsValidEmail method, under the ValidateEmailSoap section. Each web service (where appropriate) will come supplied with parameters. In this case there is only a single parameter, the email address, which needs to be supplied so that the web service can go and validate it. It will be selected by default in the next screen.In the next screen you get to edit the SOAP request. This is the XML payload that will be sent to the web service and if you look really carefully you can see that it contains the “Email” parameter. I’ve highlighted it in the image below... If you want to edit this parameter you can do so by clicking on the Edit Parameter button. For now, hit that button and you will see the following screen: Highlight the parameter line and click Edit. Now enter your email address as a test example. We will remove this later as we want the parameter to be provided dynamically for each line of the report, but for now we just want to test if we can get this thing working! OK your way back to the main wizard screen and click next. The following screen will be displayed. You don’t need to make any changes to the default settings.Next we need to tell BIRT how to interpret the data that comes back from the web service. In our example it’s pretty straightforward as the service only returns a single field saying True or False. But some web service can return full data sets involving rows and columns, so this is where we define what the returned XML will contain.If you expand the tree on the left, you will eventually come across an element called IsValidEmailResult. Highlight it and click on the little right pointing arrow in the middle.Press OK on the next screen that appears:And notice how your selection has been returned as a long string of characters. This is called an XPath and tells BIRT how to find the selected element in the XML response file./SOAP-ENV:Envelope/SOAP-ENV:Body/IsValidEmailResponse/IsValidEmailResultClick Next to see the following screen where we define which elements of the XML make up the columns of our data set. As mentioned previously we only have one column, so again select the IsValidEmailResult element. Nudge it across to the right using the arrow and as before accept the defaults that pop up. Click the Show Sample Data button and if you have got everything right so far, the default email address that you entered earlier will be passed to the web service and the response will be displayed in a table like this: Now click finish to get everything saved and you will see the data set edit screen: Now we know the data set is working well, we can go and remove the parameter value. Click on Parameters, highlight the single entry that appears and click Edit. DON’T click Remove because all we want to do here is remove the default parameter value, not the parameter itself!Delete the default value that you provided earlier ADDING THE WEB SERVICE RESULT TO THE REPORTIn your standard listing report, add a column and within the detail row it add a table. Make this table just 2 columns  by 1 row and associate it with the email validator data set. So now you should have a report, with a master table which pulls its data from your database of name and email addresses and a sub table in the last column which pulls its data from the email validation web service.Drag the IsEmailValidResult node from the data set to the first column of your sub-table. Click on the Data Set Parameter Binding button in the lower portion of the screen. Highlight the row that exists, click edit and launch the Java function editor using the fx button.Navigate your way through Available Column Bindings, Table and finally Email.The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that these values are being provided by the master table and not the sub-table, thus applying a value (the email address) as a parameter to the sub-table result set.When you preview your report you will see that you get a true or false value generated dynamically by the web service, for each entry in your database.ADDING THE DYNAMIC GRAPHIC What we need to do now is add a splash of colour to our report to make it more visually appealing to our users. We will achieve this by adding a red cross or a green tick in place of the true/false text, depending on the value. Start by getting hold of a couple of small graphics files that you will use for your tick and cross. Some suitable files are supplied with this guide, copy these into the report source directory.Drop an image field into the report layout in place of the true/false text field and select the option Image File in shared resources.  Launch the Java function editor and coy in the following code:if (row["IsValidEmailResult"]== "true") {   "tick.jpg" } else {  "cross.jpg"Now when you run your report you should see the ticks and crosses appropriately.  The full version of this report, including screen shots and source code, in full colour pdf is available for free download at http://www.BIRTReporting.com