Question

I have a Flex application that needs to grab reporting data from a JasperReports Server, through the JasperReports Server Web Services API. Flex Builder 3 does a nice job of generating the web services consumption code, with one exception. If you ask for a directory list or an accounting of report parameters, JR Server returns plain XML in the SOAP wrapper and Flex parses it just fine. However, if you ask for a report itself, whether in XML or PDF format, it comes back as a multipart MIME message with some descriptive XML as the first part and the report — even if the report itself is XML — as the second part. Flex doesn’t know what to do with multipart messages and just complains about invalid XML.

Here’s a sample of the response. My current strategy is do some string parsing and manage the bits individually. But does Flex have any built-in methods to handle this? (I’ve been unable to find any.)

------=_Part_2_27050467.1235668849951 Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary Content-Id: <0F082AF1DAF83B3077B1867B4FC8AAA6>  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/' xmlns:xsd='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema' xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'> <soapenv:Body>     <ns1:runReportResponse soapenv:encodingStyle='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/' xmlns:ns1='http://axis2.ws.jasperserver.jaspersoft.com'>         <runReportReturn xsi:type='xsd:string'>&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;\n&lt;operationResult version=&quot;2.0.1&quot;&gt;\n\t&lt;returnCode&gt;&lt;![CDATA[0]]&gt;&lt;/returnCode&gt;\n&lt;/operationResult&gt;\n         </runReportReturn>     </ns1:runReportResponse> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> ------=_Part_2_27050467.1235668849951 Content-Type: application/pdf Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary Content-Id: <report>  %PDF-1.4\n%âãÏÓ\n1 0 obj <</Filter/FlateDecode/Length 29>>stream\nx+är\ná26S°00S\bIár\rá\näâ 

Answer 1

What I am going to say is only what I believe:I may be wrong since I haven’t tried this out.

I don’t think you have much choice. Flex HTTPService (or whatever you are using) can offer only so many (/or so few) data formats. See here. For any custom stream you will have to retrieve it as an object and pass it through your own decoder. It appears that Flex does not do any parsing of the MIME message but depends on (which is also how browsers behave typically) the server to identify the content that is being transmitted. If the server only sends a text file but changes the content type to say audio/mpeg I think you will have the same problem. Even when Flex does know hot to handle text.

If you ever can get around to doing this experiment (with text files as MIME type video or whatever fancies you) do let us know.

Meanwhile, you can take a look at SerializationFilter and go on and add a new MIME type for PDF!

Hopefully, life will be a little easy with Flex 4 and the HTTPMultiService.