Question

I’m looking for a Report Designer that will allow me to connect to a RESTful webservice. Ideally I would like one that has a royalty-free End-User Report Designer. WE will be hosting it in an ASP.NET web site. So something compatable with that would be ideal 😉

We used to use Data Dynamics Active Reports. However this doesn’t allow connections to webservices.

Any help, very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Crafty

Answer 1

I’m not sure what you mean by asking for a report generator that can connect to a web service.

Web services aren’t something you can report on. They’re just a source of data. What do you want to connect to and what data are you expecting to get back?

The problem with RESTful web services is you don’t know what you’re going to get back (there’s no schema as with a DB table).

The good thing about RESTful web services is you’re probably going to get back some XML, and the Active Reports product you mention seems to do things with XML files.

‘ActiveReports for .NET 3.0 supports many XML-based files for data input.’

Cam you call the web services for the information you need and squirrel it away in some files (or a DB) first?

Or are you in essence asking for something that can query a RESTful web service in some reasonably complex way and return the results of the query in some structured way that a report generator can then consume?

Do you have specific RESTful web services in mind, and if so do you know what format they will return data in? Then your question is really about report generators that can handle that returned format, perhaps.

Or something else and I’ve missed the point?