[SharePoint/MOSS 2007]
I want to access several web services (on external sites, with WSDL descriptors), and graphically display the data, using a separate web part to display each item.
The graph for each is quite simple - just a thermometer, or traffic lights (as in KPI).
I want to be able to access more detail about the data with a web click
What are the basic sharepoint components for this?
I am able to program a web part, if necessary.
(background - I've been looking through KPI, PerformancePoint, Data Connection Libraries, InfoPath, Business Data catalogs, etc. I just need a someone to tell me which are the right components for further investigation).
I think you should solve this without considering SharePoint, i.e. you should create Web Services proxies (add Service reference) in order to access the external Web Service and then create the necessary HTML to represent the result.
One this is working, you can wrap it in a Web part.
You could use the Business Data Catalog to access the Web Service, but it is really hard to use and then you'd still need some way to transform the data in order to get the graphical display. KPIs are useful if you have lists with the required information, not for external data from a Web Service. I don't see InfoPath or PerformancePoint playing any role in this case.
Related
I am working on developing an integration with Workday. Under my initial analysis, I found that Workday provides multiple wsdls for different modules like "Human resource", "Inventory" etc. I can see this complete list at https://community.workday.com/sites/default/files/file-hosting/productionapi/operations/index.html
I am trying to understand how I get get this list progamatically in my integration so that my user can select one of the wsdls rather than typing in the full name of WSDL. Please share your thoughts on this.
You can programatically retrieve a list of all web service operations by creating a Custom Report based on the "Public Web Services" data source. The report can then be exposed as a RESTful WS for easy retrieval.
Some fields you can include in the report are: Web service, supported operations, api version, endpoint url, WSDL url, etc, etc.
This is highly customisable, in the sense that you can query the RESTful WS Report for specific versions, specific operations, etc, via Prompts / URL Params.
The report-as-a-service, supports also a variety of output formats as well as its own WSDL.
The purpose of a SOAP WSDL is to generate a client stub, i.e. a model that lets your client interact with objects exposed or consumed by the service provider. You don't interact with a WSDL at runtime - you interact with the stub. If you want to make multiple services available, you have to include each WSDL in your client application at compile time and generate their stubs. The services in a given API version do not change, so there isn't a reason to do this dynamically.
To add to the query asked, what we are trying to understand is that whether there an API call/request which we could hit to get the list of web services available to populate it on the UI to select from it.
For Example: In this link, https://community.workday.com/sites/default/files/file-hosting/productionapi/index.html, we have Absence_Management, Academic_Advising, Academic_Foundation and so on and Now, if I want it to be displayed to the end user so that He can select the webservice to be used and accordingly we could download the WSDL as to work on it.
Currently I am creating app that needs to store and pull data from database by multiple users.
Since I do not have much knowledge in database, MS Access, and MS Sharepoint, I would like to know if it is possible to use share point as database for my iOS application, which implemented in pure swift code.
Any one with knowledge in this field please help me by providing advice on if it works, and, if possible, how can I successfully implement this.
Thank you for all the helps.
I don’t see why this would not work. As long as the SharePoint tables follow the rules for Access, then you can place the ms-access application on each desktop. Anytime “any” user of that application updates or adds records, then all other users will “eventually” see the updates. So in this setup, the desktop users can in fact “run” the application “off line”. The instant such users get Wi-Fi or a connection (or always have one), then the data is synced in real time.
The above setup takes no coding and is part of the Access system which supports those SharePoint tables.
As for the iOS and that part of the application? Again, I see little problem since all of the abilities of SharePoint are available as a web service. So as long as your development platform supports standard web services, then your application can interact with that web service to retrieve and update rows of data in those SharePoint tables. As noted, the “sync” to the Access clients will thus reflect any updates to that data.
Since near every modern phone development system supports interaction with web services, then the phone software can do the same. You not have an ODBC like interface, but you can query the data (CAMEL).
The Access desktop client will also be interacting with the SharePoint tables via a web service, but from Access point of view the SharePoint tables (lists) look like any regular SQL like table. So standard VBA code and DAO reocrdsets are supported.
The web services for SharePoint are outlined here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms479390(v=office.12).aspx
And this video shows how you can upload data to SharePoint from Access, and NOTE how the relational table ability of SharePoint is supported by Access. Once that data is uploaded, then Access supports updating of such data as if the data was a local table.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wdjYIby_b0&list=PL27E956A1537FE1C5&index=2
You can use a single office 365 account at $6 per month for the above, and that single account supports 500 free users. So if you don’t have SharePoint (or don’t want to bother with SharePoint, a single office 365 account also offers these SharePoint services for that one stupid low price of $6 per month – and that account with work with the free Access runtime that that you can use to run the Access side for free on the desktop part of this application.
I am running a site in which I am using SignalR with a custom scaleout backplane that allows us to push out real-time data to users connected to any of our load balanced web servers.
I recently found out that the Kendo UI components for MVC (which we use for other site features) can be configured to use SignalR rather than AJAX for binding with the data model. It seems like using web sockets via SignalR could potentially offer a performance boost over using AJAX as we are now. However, I would ideally like to let our kendo components access a SignalR instance that only uses whatever web server they connect to rather than using the instance with the scaleout backplane since that would involve a lot of overgead that isn't necessary for that data binding.
I should mention that there would be cases where we would have one page with one partial view that uses one SignalR configuration and another partial view that uses the other.
Is this something that can be done? If so, are there recommended ways of going about doing so?
I am not entirely certain about your approach but you can of course have 2 SignalR servers using different kinds of backplanes and connect to the 2 servers from a client. You would have to though look into how to handle cross-domain requests with SignalR.
What is the best way to create forms (textfields, checkboxes, radio buttons, ...) and handle the data after the user's input?
Just use web components as dart's web ui?
http://www.dartlang.org/articles/web-ui/
http://www.dartlang.org/docs/tutorials/web-ui/
edit: Lets imagine the following example application: I would like to create an online quiz/test.
First the user has to register
Data will be stored in a textfile or in a database
User can log in and play an online quiz or do an online test.
For that quiz/test i need to evaluate the input with the predefined correct answers
Here's a high-level answer to your question.
To handle data on the server side you can use the HttpServer class to start a web server. See this article.
To store data in a flat file you'll need to use the dart:io package to open a file and write to it. See the documentation for File.openWrite().
To store data in a database there are packages available on pub for mysql and postgresql.
There are two different ways to implement the client side. The traditional way is to use templating to generate html with the data in input elements within a form tag, and then handle the form submission in your webserver.
The modern way, that is the focus within the Dart community, is to write a single page app, which uses HttpRequest to read data from and send data to the server (usually using json).
On the client side, you could retrieve data from server (e.g. as JSON) and use that to build a form. This seems like a good fit for a web component as elements can be dynamically added based on received data.
The component would be bound to the model so you can serialize the model object to JSON on submit and send it to server on submit or just send it as standard HTML form.
The server side of the story is less clear, there are no production quality web server libraries that I am aware of, but you could take a look at DartExpress as an example, or Stream, and there are others, more or less complete. Anyway, you would have to extract the POST payload from HttpRequest (if sent as JSON) or use the form data which is also accessible via queryParameters property - please note that this is Dart:io.HttpRequest class, not Dart:html.HttpRequest, and it is available only on server side.
The mentioned server frameworks simplify this part a bit.
Using Web-UI would be a good choice. The todomvc application illustrates nicely how to dynamically capture the input from a user. Processing on the server side is wide open as far as choices go. Dart does have server side capabilities, and you could use some of the existing libraries to accomplish what you want.
Another way that you can process the information server side is to comunicate with the DB directly using a REST based web service like CouchDB. Cloudant offers such a service and allows you to communicate directly to the DB from the client, providing you can overcome the Same-Origin-Policy. There are 2 ways to do this. Enable CORS on the CouchDB instance, or host your application on the server that has the DB, which is also possible with CouchDB.
Dart serverside also supports websockets, so you can easily deliver the user provided data to the server with web sockets, and then do whatever processing you like on the serverside.
One other option I can think of would be to have the information processed and saved in the local browser. You can access the local DB or local browser file system from the Dart client, and keep everything local. For statistics, you can have the client update a web service of your choice.
I have some delphi code which, given a list of items, calculates the total price taking into account any special deals that might apply.
This code is non-trivial to rewrite in another language.
How should I set it up to communicate with a website running on the same server? The website will need to ask it for a price every time the user updates their shopping cart. It's possible that there will be multiple concurrent requests.
The delphi code needs to maintain an in-memory list of special deals, periodically refreshed from a database. So it cannot simply be executed every time or anything as simple as that.
I don't know what the website is written in, or even which http server it runs under, so I'm just looking for ideas or standard methods.
It sounds like the win32 app is already running as a Windows Service on the box. So, if you can't modify that service, you are going to have to deal with whatever way it wants to accept and respond to requests. This could be through sockets or some higher level communication protocol like web services.
You could do a couple of things. Write an assembly that knows how to communicate with the service and have your web site use that assembly. Or you could build a shim service that knows how to communicate with the legacy service, but exposes communication over higher level protocols such as web services. Either way will have the benefit of hiding the concurrency, threading and communications issue behind an easy to call interface, but the latter will make communicating with the service easier for everyone going forward.
If you can modify the delphi app to take an XML request and respond with an XML answer over a TCP socket (ideally using the HTTP protocol), you will be able to make it interoperate with most web server frameworks relatively easily. But the exact details of how to make that integration happen will depend on the language/framework it was written in.
If the web server is on windows you can compile your delphi app as a DLL that can return XML or HTML, taking parameters as part of the URL or a POST operation. Some details on making a Delphi DLL for web servers are here.
It doesn't matter what web server or OS the existing system is running under. What matters is what you want YOUR code to run under. If it is windows then the easiest solution would be to use WebBroker and write a custom ISAPI application, or use SOAP to expose web services. The first method could be used if you wanted to write a rest like API for instance, the second if your web application has the ability to consume web services.
Another option, if you are running both on the same box under IIS, is to create a COM/Automation object which you then invoke via server side scripting (ASP). If the application is an ASP.NET application, then I would use PRISM to port your code into an assembly.
I have done this with a quite complicated workers compensation calculator. I created a windows service using RemObjects Sdk. The calculations are exposed as a soap method so it can be accessed by nearly anything.
It's not necessary to use RemObjects in the service but it makes it much easier to do as it handles a lot of the underlying plumbing. The clients don't need RemObjects, they just need to be able to call soap methods. Nearly any programming langugae can do that.
You could also create an isapi dll for IIS that exposes a soap interface. This would be useful if other websites on different servers needed access to the methods. However I have handled this in my case by opening a port in the firewall to access my windows service.
There is a lot of examples on the web. A couple of places to start reading are About.Com and Dr Bob.
Torn this app into Windows Service. Write Web Service that will communicate with your windows service. You should spend some time designing your Web Service, because this Web Service is going to be your consistent interface, shielding old Delphi app. So in the future whenever you will want to write web app, mobile app, or whatever you will imagine, you will have one consistent interface – XML Web Service.
A popular way to integrate a web application with background services is a message broker.
The message flow would be:
the web application sends a "calculation request" message to a message destination on the message broker, which contains all needed parameters and also a correlation id to match the calculation request with the response from the Delphi service
one (or, in a high availability / load balanced environment more) Delphi services handle the messages: pull the next incoming message, process it by feeding the parameters to the calculation engine, and send a "calculation result message" back to the web server
the web server can either synchronously wait for the response (and discard responses which have no matching correlation ide) and build the result HTML document, or continue with other tasks and asynchronously receive the calculation result in a separate thread, for example in a Ajax based web application
See for an introduction this slideshow about the Dopplr image service:
http://de.slideshare.net/carsonified/dopplr-its-made-of-messages-matt-biddulph-presentation
If you can make it a service (but not a library), you have to do inter-process communication somehow - there are a few ways to do this on Windows:
Sockets directly which is hardest since you have to do marshalling/auth yourself
Shared Memory (yuck!)
RPC which works great but isn't trivial
DCOM which is easier but a pain to configure
WCF - but can you call it from your Windows Service written in Delphi?