Recently I have been working a lot with the Webtrends DX web services here internally. Our consulting & services group has been working with various technologies to connect, retrieve data, and provide that data in informational reports to clients and partners. In the course of working on these various projects I have added some functionality to the Webtrends DX web services SDK and also made some fairly solid in roads on the practices used to develop applications for Excel, Outlook, and other Microsoft Office Applications. Here is a break down of the progress I have made over the last few weeks. I hope it is helpful in everyone's efforts to extend, report, and provide analytics data & knowledge to their respective organizations!
Webtrends DX SDK - The SDK provides dramatically simplified standard programmatic access to reports, profile listings, report listings, and a mapper object to provide the reports in various object formats. Recently I have added the ability for the mapper object to take a standard dimensional report object and provide the report as a standard ADO.NET DataTable. This dramatically simplifies a lot of the functions of sorting, finding, or specifying various parts of the report data or manipulating it for presentation. In addition this is a more familiar object format for ETL using SSIS or even other ETL tools out on the market. The following is an example of the code used to retrieve a report with the SDK and then do a conversion into a standard DataTable Object.
User webtrendsUser =
new User
{
AccountName = Resources.Options.Default.Account,
UserName = Resources.Options.Default.Password,
Password = EncryptionHelper.Decrypt(Resources.Options.Default.Password)
};
var report = ReportFactory.CreateDimensionalReport("reportIdGoesHere", "profileIdGoesHere", null, null, null,
null, null, true, webtrendsUser);
Mapper mapper = new Mapper(report);
DataTable dataTable = mapper.MapReportDefinitionToDataTable();
In the code above, I have created a Webtrends User object and assigned the appropriate parameters. In this case I am using the Resources (Options.Settings) available to Windows Application to store and retrieve those settings. This way the user will not have to enter them every time they want to run the report.
I then have the report object being pulled from the ReportFactory Object via the CreateDimensionalReport factory method. The parameters that are actually needed are the report ID, the profile ID, and the Webtrends User Object. The null values are other various parameters that can be set but do not particularly need to be set.
Then I create a Mapper Object and pass it the report object via the constructor. This object requires a report object upon instantiation. I setup the object this way since there always needs to be a report object before any manipulations or mappings can be made.
The last step is to declare the DataTable Object, then pull the data table from the builder method MapReportDefinitionToDataTable().
For the SDK assembly and code check out the Document Outlining the offering. In addition over the next couple of weeks I will be posting more information regarding how to use the SDK, best practices, and code snippets for accessing the Webtrends DX Web Services. There will be additional blog entries and definitely some documentation coming soon (I'm working on it!). But in the meantime, if you have any questions, comments, or ideas on how we should extend or modify the SDK please let us know here on the Webtrends Developer Forums!
I'll have some more entries real soon about best practices, how to code against Outlook or Excel, and more. So subscribe and stay up to speed on everything Webtrends! Thanks for reading.
