On-Demand Custom Application Example

Bjorn_Wedbratt — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 13:40:30 GMT

NPrinting’s On-Demand Service exposes a standard interface that can be used by custom applications. This article shows you an example of a simple C# application that runs an NPrinting Task and a Report from the command line. The application is kept simple so you can focus on implementing NPrinting On-Demand on your own.

Pre-Requirements

.NET 4.5 installed
NPrinting Training environment installed. Download it from: NPrinting Training Material and decompress into C:\NPrintingTraining. The source code of the application is saved in the folder C:\NPrintingTraining\CustomApplication\OnDemandCustomApplicationSample.
On-Demand Service running - You need a license with On-Demand feature enabled, then install and configure the NPrinting Service. Refer to the tutorialHow to Configure QlikView NPrinting 16 Service

Optional requirements

To open the sample project you need Visual Studio 2013.

Architecture

You can connect to On-Demand Services via the SOAP/WSDL web-service located at http://{yourserver}:{port}/ODS. If your server is installed on the local machine and it has a standard port, you’ll need to use the following URL: http://localhost:9000/ODS. Opening it you’ll see an help page. WSDL is available at: http~~://{yourserver}:{port}/ODS?wsdl. With a local installation, use: http://localhost:9000/ODS?wsdl~~

The example is a .NET command-line application which calls the NPrinting On-Demand web-service to generate and download a report, also to run a task. All call details are explained in C# source files.

By integrating an NPrinting Project with a custom application you can:

Generate any report
Run any task
Filter reports or tasks with your own custom filters
Filter reports or tasks with saved filters
Filter reports or tasks for recipients you prefer

Custom application can be developed with the programming languages you prefer (i.e. Java, PHP,C#...). Just connect to the aforementioned web-service. We suggest using C# sources as the guideline for implementation in other languages.

Suggested integration architecture

In general, we suggest using On-Demand web-service as a back-end integration solution. For example, you can integrate an existing PHP portal by calling On-Demand web-service on the server-side to generate reports. For security reasons, be sure not to allow users to reach the On-Demand web-service.

Example project

The example project can be opened through Visual Studio 2013. The source code is locates at:

C:\NPrintingTraining\CustomApplication\OnDemandCustomApplicationSample.

If you open the project with Visual Studio, you can modify it and run it. This is how we suggest experimenting with On-Demand web-service.

To run the example, use the pre-compiled version which can be found at

C:\NPrintingTraining\CustomApplication\OnDemandCustomApplicationSample\OnDemandCustomApplicationSample\bin\Release\OnDemandCustomApplicationSample.exe