Hi All,
Recently our company decided to move from BOXI 3.1 to 4.1.
We're using BOXI 3.1 .NET Enterprise SDK to run Publications and distribute reports to users.
Basically, workflow is as follows (simplified):
We run multiple publications simultaneously on a Job server; each publication has a Webi document associated with it. To make reports refreshing properly, we update underlying Webi document's Prompts (without saving this document back to InfoStore), and then run this Publication. Each publication has MHTML output format enabled among all others (this is required); all these output files are distributed to a dedicated folder using a DiskUnmanaged plugin. Then we process/distribute these files by using our own custom framework.
When I tried to investigate how to do it with SDK version 4.1, I noticed that there are few key parts missing:
- BusinessObjects.Enterprise.Desktop.Webi does not exist anymore, and there's no more ReportEngine, so there's no way to get a Webi document together with its Prompts;
- Even if we could get Webi Prompts somehow, there's no way to copy Prompts values back to Publication's underlying Webi document, because there's no ReportParameterUtility anymore with its PopulateWebiPrompts method.
The question is: is there some alternative how to achieve the same in .NET 4.1 SDK?
I know, there is RESTful web services SDK; it allows running publications, but there is no way to set up prompts of a Publication's underlying Webi, and running Webi Reports directly is not something we want (plus MHTML output is not supported in this case). It is possible in fact to export a Webi report to MHTML, but it will require to save refreshed report back to InfoStore prior to exporting, which we don't want either.
We're considering moving BOXI-interoperating code to Java SDK 4.1 as Java's one is more feature-rich, written in pure Java contrary to .NET's COM interop, includes a proper documentation (which is not the case with .NET one) and probably it will allow to reuse existing workflow completely (there are some quirks with populateWebiPrompts still, but there is one 'unofficial' workaround to solve that).
What would you recommend?