I've been looking over the WebFOCUS Web Services and how I might use them from within a .NET application. In particular, I'm interested in passing a .NET data set into the report and having the report use the data set. I've seen the code for what I need to do in the .NET application, but I've not been able to find any samples of what the FEX file would look like. Also, I'm not completely sure what I can and can't do with the .NET data set once I have it inside the FEX. Any insights that anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated. And, if somebody could provide a sample that'd be super.

As far as I can remember a .NET dataset is an analog within .NET of an SQL table with triggers that allow automatic update of the underlying table.

For your question to be answered we need to know if the controlling application is .NET or WF.

If it is .NET then it will be the consumer of a Wf webservice which should be relatively well known how to do this.

If the controller is wf then I don't know how wf would use any webservice provided by .net.
If it was satisfactory for the wf report to not have the absolute latest information, not yet committed by the .net dataset to the underlying SQL table, then wf would just use the SQL table directly through one of its many adapters.

Need a bit more info on this one I'm afraid...

hammo1j,

The controlling application would be the .NET application. It will be consuming a WF web service. We want to pass a .NET data set as input to the WF web service call.

Use the .net web service consume in the WF. Create the data adpater using web service and can able to see all the public webmethods of .net web service. Then using table request command which will execute the webservice.

I already know how to consume web services in .NET. What I want to know is what does the FOCUS code look like that will receive the dataset. Or put another way, how does FOCUS treat a .NET dataset. A sample FEX would be really helpful.

Hi SoftwareArtiste,

Has this issue been resolved on your side? Many thanks to everyone's help on this one.

I forwarded this to an internal expert to review and here are some suggestions:


The functionality to pass a .NET Dataset to a WebFOCUS Report was added in WebFOCUS 7.1.
The WebFOCUS Web Service function to do this is WebFocusRunFexExtendedDS.
Page 4-27 of the WebFOCUS Web Services 7.1 manual shows how to do this.
WebFOCUS Web Services 7.1
(You will need to have an InfoResponse username/password to access the manual.)

When the Dataset is passed to this function, it is converted to an XML file in the temp directory.
A master would have to be created in order to report against the XML.
You can use the WebFocusSchemaInfo function to determine what fields should be included in the Master.
This function also takes a Dataset as input.
This function is documented on Page 4-64 of the WebFOCUS Web Services 7.1 manual.

Below is what the Master looks like for the example on Page 4-28 of the WebFOCUS Web Services manual:

FILENAME=MYDATASET, SUFFIX=XML    , $
  SEGMENT=ROOT, SEGTYPE=S0, $
  FIELDNAME=COUNTRY, ALIAS=COUNTRY, USAGE=A30, ACTUAL=A30, $
  FIELDNAME=CAR, ALIAS=CAR, USAGE=A30, ACTUAL=A30, $
  FIELDNAME=MODEL, ALIAS=MODEL, USAGE=A30, ACTUAL=A30, $

Here is a sample FEX using this Master File:

TABLE FILE MYDATASET
PRINT
     COUNTRY
     CAR
     MODEL
END

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Kerry

Hi ,
The answer is 100% yes .
The .net webservices must return an recordset object .

Regards,
mtguy