Search code examples
javaapibusiness-intelligencebusiness-objects

How to run and download a BusinessObjects report as text

My Question: How do you run and download a report to text? In BusinessObjects, you can download reports as a plain text file. The documentation for the API indicates that you can download reports in various formats. How is this accomplished?

How to download them as PDF: In the documentation, they describe how to download them as a PDF file:

ViewSupport pdfViewSupport = new ViewSupport();
pdfViewSupport.setOutputFormat(OutputFormatType.PDF);
pdfViewSupport.setViewType(ViewType.BINARY);
pdfViewSupport.setViewMode(ViewModeType.DOCUMENT);

RetrieveBinaryView retBinView = new RetrieveBinaryView();
retBinView.setViewSupport(pdfViewSupport);

RetrieveData retBOData = new RetrieveData();
retBOData.setRetrieveView(retBinView);

DocumentInformation docInfo = boReportEngine.getDocumentInformation(struid, null, null, null, retBOData);
BinaryView myBOView = (BinaryView) boDocInfo.getView();
byte[] docContents = myBOView.getContent();

When I change:

pdfViewSupport.setOutputFormat(OutputFormatType.PDF);
pdfViewSupport.setViewType(ViewType.BINARY);
pdfViewSupport.setViewMode(ViewModeType.DOCUMENT);

to

pdfViewSupport.setOutputFormat(OutputFormatType.INT_HTML);
pdfViewSupport.setViewType(ViewType.INT_CHARACTER);
pdfViewSupport.setViewMode(ViewModeType.INT_REPORT_PAGE);

I get the following error:

org.apache.axis2.AxisFault: Binary view of such a document should be only requested with the use of ViewType.BINARY (WRE 01151)

The funny thing is that I set the ViewType to be INT_CHARACTER, not BINARY...

It breaks on the line:

DocumentInformation docInfo = boReportEngine.getDocumentInformation(struid, null, null, null, retBOData);

What I'm trying to do: It's really complicated, but I basically want to have a report which returns a single row and just prints that on the report (nothing else) and then download that report as text because the text is xml which I use in another program.

Any help would be great!

Note: I'm running on a 3.2 server, but we'll be upgrading to 4.0 pretty soon. So if the solution could work for both versions, that'd be awesome, otherwise a v4 and v3.x solution would be awesome as well :)

Solution

  • The problem this line:

    RetrieveBinaryView retBinView = new RetrieveBinaryView();

    So I don't know how this all works, but this is what you're looking for:

    ViewSupport viewSupport = ViewSupport.Factory.newInstance();
viewSupport.setOutputFormat(OutputFormatType.INT_XML);
viewSupport.setViewType(ViewType.INT_CHARACTER);
viewSupport.setViewMode(ViewModeType.INT_REPORT_PAGE);

RetrieveData retBOData = RetrieveData.Factory.newInstance();

RetrieveXMLView retXMLView = RetrieveXMLView.Factory.newInstance();
retXMLView.setViewSupport(viewSupport);
retBOData.setRetrieveView(retXMLView);
DocumentInformation boDocInfo = getDocInfo(actions, retBOData);
XMLView bView = (XMLView) boDocInfo.getView();
ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream(bView.getContentLength());
bView.getContent().save(out);
byte[] reportBytes = out.toByteArray();
String reportInString = new String(reportBytes);

    However, the reportInString here is XML representing the report. So what I did was encapsulate what I want out of the report with a prefix and suffix. So, for example, let's say I encapsulate it with @#$ThisIsWhatYouWant- and -End$#@, then I would do the following:

    Pattern patt = Pattern.compile("(?i)@#$ThisIsWhatYouWant-(.*?)-End$#@", Pattern.DOTALL);
Matcher match = patt.matcher(reportInString);
if (match.find()) {
  return match.group(1);
}
return null;

    P.S. This should work for both 3.x and 4.0 BO Servers.