More Changes to flex_ws_api

I added three new functions to the flex_ws_api. The most significant is the new make_request function which is just like the procedure with the same name but returns an XML type instead of storing the results in a collection. It became apparent to me that you may want to make a request without storing the results in a collection. In my particular case, I was working on a sample application for BiPublisher.

BiPublisher has a service called the PublicReportService. Tyler Muth has blogged about using the scheduleReport operation to schedule a report to be run and delivered vi email or ftp from an Application Express interface. But what if you want the report right now and allow for downloading it directly from that application? There is a runReport operation of the service to allow just that. It returns the report base64 encoded, and you just have to write a process to convert that to a BLOB and download it. No problem!

I set out to build a sample application that would do just that. I noticed that there was an operation called validateLogin so I thought maybe I could create a custom authentication scheme using flex_ws_api to validate the user by making a call to the PublicReportService. That is when I realized that storing the result in a collection won't do any good if the user does not have a valid session yet. So there was a need for a function to return the results as an XMLType. I also added two functions to parse out the results of the XMLType, parse_xml and parse_xml_clob.

I was successful in building the custom authentication scheme after I added these functions. I was also successful in building the rest of the application. You login using the validateLogin operation, view and traverse folders from the BiPublisher repository using the getFolderContents operation, and click on links to download the report using the runReport operation, all in an Application Express application. I plan to make the sample application available on OTN along with a white paper on how it was built. Stay tuned.