How Are You Using BusinessObjects RESTful Web Services?

[mgrackin]

Our organization is beginning to look into using BusinessObjects RESTful Web Services to feed dashboarding tools such as PowerBI. I am curious how others are using BusinessObjects RESTful Web Services. It would be great just to know how others are integrating BusinessObjects RESTful Web Services into their applications and organization. Thanks!

[former_member615146]

I have been using BIPRWS and the API:

GET /documents/<docID>/reports/<reportID>?<optional parameters>
Headers:
X-SAP-LogonToken <value>
Accept text/csv
Content-Type text.csv 
Params columnDelimiter , ! No enclosing quotes around comma

This will deliver a CSV feed into Power BI which you van then prep in the Query Editor.

to pull data out of webi reports in BO 4.2. It works on Tomcat (But Not SP7 P2 - there was a regression - fixed in P4) and WACS.

However, according to SAP Support it does not work on WACS 4.1! It returns column headers but no data.

You can call this from Power BI Web Services Interface.

Please note that you must pass a SAP-logon-token in the header with each call.

The SAP logon token can be extracted using:

GET /logon/long

to retrieve the JSON:

{
    "password": "",
    "clientType": "",
    "auth": "secEnterprise",
    "userName": ""
}

You then paste this into the body along with username, password, and authentication method to get a SAP_logon_token

[mgrackin]

Michael, Thanks for the information. That is very interesting that PowerBI can make the RESTful call directly, provided there is a X-SAP-LogonToken. I am not that familiar with PowerBI capabilities so this helps to know. Unfortunately, we are about to upgrade to SP7, Patch 02 so, as you said, it will not work for us (yet).

[DellSC]

I have used them from a completely different angle than you are.

I write a lot of code using the various SDKs to pull information out of the CMS database and out of individual objects in the CMS. I've used the RESTful SDK in a program that combines several SDKs - Java, .NET, Designer, Semantic Layer, and RESTful - to pull information about objects in universes and then link objects in Webi reports to objects in universes. All of the data is store in a SQL Server database and there is a universe so that we can write reports off of it. With the older Rebean SDK being deprecated with the 4.x versions, the only way to get the information about what universe objects are being used in the Webi reports is through the RESTful SDK.

-Dell

[mgrackin]

Thanks, Dell, for sharing. I also have a tool I created using the BusinessObjects Java SDK libraries to dig around the CMS contents in a friendlier/usable way. I have plans in mind to convert to using RESTful calls for this tool as time permits once we get RESTful up and running. We have strict security requirements in our organization and haven't been able to secure RESTful Web Services well enough (via WACS) to get Authority to Operate with it. Hopefully once we get upgraded to BOB 4.2, SP6 and deploy directly under Apache Tomcat it will be secure enough. There's a bug with BOB 4.2, SP5 deploying under Apache Tomcat 9 which is fixed in SP6, hence why I am waiting for a stable SP6 and Patch ? combination to which to upgrade.

[DellSC]

The problem with using just the RESTful web services has been that not all of the InfoObject properties are included in the results yet. So, you may or may not be able to get all of the information you need from there. Also, if you need to get details about Crystal reports, the Crystal RESTful SDK only works with Crystal for Enterprise reports - not for "classic" Crystal - and it primarily allow you to just connect to data from the reports. This means that you can't get things like parameters or any of the Crystal-specific properties through REST.

You also can't get universe object details through REST - you have to use either the Designer (.unv) or Semantic Layer (.unx) to get that information.

SAP has stated that they plan to move all of the SDK to REST so that they no longer have to provide the multiple SDKs, but it's not all there yet and, while it gets better with each SP, there are still a lot of important gaps.

-Dell