API Submission Report Tutorial

API Submission Report Tutorial

Introduction

We are going to create a web application using the frevvo Data API, which will fetch submissions from the frevvo database and create an HTML report based on those submissions. We will use the Leave Approval Workflow as an example (download it here.) Using this workflow an Employee will file a vacation request, which will be approved by his Manager. This workflow generates a submission XML like this one:

<p0:form xmlns:p0="http://www.frevvo.com/schemas/_gJamE-62EeCXN_lW5l3omQ" name="LeaveApproval">   <Message7>Leave Approval</Message7>   <Employee>     <EId>emp</EId>     <MId>mgr</MId>     <EFullName>femp lemp</EFullName>     <EEmail>emp@frevvo.com</EEmail>   </Employee>   <LeaveRequest>     <StartDate>2012-09-17</StartDate>     <NumberOfDays>2</NumberOfDays>     <TypeOfLeave>Annual</TypeOfLeave>     <Comments>test</Comments>   </LeaveRequest>   <ManagerApproval>     <MFullName>fmgr lmgr</MFullName>     <MEmail>mgr@frevvo.com</MEmail>     <IApproveThisVacationRequest>Denied</IApproveThisVacationRequest>     <Comments>rejected.</Comments>   </ManagerApproval> </p0:form>

In this tutorial, we will get all the submission XMLs for this workflow from the frevvo submission database. Then we will parse the submission XMLs to extract the required data (StartDate, NumberOfDays, TypeOfLeave, and IApproveThisVacationRequest fields) for a particular Employee and display this data as a vacation report for that Employee on an HTML page.

Please see the submission-report-tutorial.war file* of the web application that we are going to create. *Follow this documentation to update Client Libraries as needed.

Try the Example Application

Install the Web Application

  1. Download and copy the war file to <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\tomcat\webapps directory.

  2. Re-start frevvo. This will expand the war.

  3. Edit the <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\tomcat\webapps\submission-report-tutorial\showReport.jsp file.

  4. On line number 20, change

    service.login ("designer@tutorial", "qa");

    to

    service.login ("<your-designer-user>@<your-tenant>", "<designer-user-password>");
  5. Save the file and re-start frevvo. 

Execute the Example Application

  1. Download the Leave Approval Workflow and upload it in your designer user.

  2. To check if your web application is working, browse http://<your frevvo server host>:<port>/submission-report-tutorial/showReport.jsp in your browser, E.g. http://localhost:8082/submission-report-tutorial/showReport.jsp. You should see a blank report like this:

  3. Now, to see the vacation report of an employee:

    1. As the Tenant Admin

      1. Create a manager user.

      2. Create an employee user with the User Id 'demoemployee' and set the Reports To field for this employee user to the manager user that you created above. This will correctly route the flow from employee to manager.

      3. Create a Role "HR" and another user who has the role "HR." This is where the third step of the workflow will route.

    2. Login as the employee user and browse the Share URL of your Leave Approval workflow. Then enter details for the leave request and submit the form.

    3. Login as the manager user and from the manager's task list approve the pending leave approval task for employee.

    4. Login as the HR user and approve the pending leave approval task.

  4. A submission was created and you should be able to open it from your workflow's submission repository.

  5. Browse http://localhost:8082/submission-report-tutorial/showReport.jsp?username=demoemployee. You should see the this submission in the employee's Vacation Report. 

Create Your Own Web Application

Create Directories and Files

  1. First, you will need to create this directory structure in your <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\tomcat\webapps folder:

    <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\tomcat\webapps                                       |_submission-report-tutorial                                               |_WEB-INF                                                       |_lib     
  2. Create a new web.xml file in <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\tomcat\webapps\submission-report-tutorial\WEB-INF directory, with following content in it. This will define our application as a web application.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd"> <web-app> </web-app>
  3. Copy the frevvo client APIs from <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\ext\client directory to the <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\tomcat\webapps\submission-report-tutorial\WEB-INF\lib directory. These are the frevvo API libraries that will be called by our web application.

  4. Create the JSP pages which call the frevvo API as explained in this documentation. Create a showReport.jsp file in <frevvo-install-dir>\frevvo\tomcat\webapps\submission-report-tutorial directory with following in it:

    <%@ page import="java.lang.*,java.util.*,com.frevvo.forms.client.*,com.frevvo.forms.client.util.*,com.google.gdata.data.Link,java.io.InputStream,com.google.gdata.client.Service.GDataRequest,java.io.IOException,javax.xml.parsers.*,org.xml.sax.*,org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler,com.google.gdata.util.ServiceException" %> <html>         <head>                <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>                <title>Vacation Report</title>         </head>         <body id="page-submissions">         <%                //Get the frevvo Forms service                FormsService service = (FormsService) session.getAttribute ( "frevvo.forms.service" );                if (service != null) {                        service.logout();                        session.removeAttribute ("frevvo.forms.service");                } else {                        service = new FormsService("http", "localhost", 8082, null);                }                  service.login ("designer@tutorial", "password");                session.setAttribute ("frevvo.forms.service", service);                  String uId  = request.getParameter("username"); //Get the value of username paramter in the request URL                if ((uId == null) || (uId.length() == 0)) {                        uId = "dummy";                        //Use a dummy user if username is not specified in the request URL.                }           %>
  5. Remember to change 

    service.login ("designer@tutorial", "qa");

    to

    service.login ("<your-designer-user>@<your-tenant>", "<designer-user-password>");

Get the Submission Feed

Now that we have the frevvo service session, we will get the submission feed of our workflow. Add the following lines to the showReport.jsp file before the closing tag (%>):

//Get the Submission Feed SubmissionQuery q = new SubmissionQuery(service.getFeedURL(SubmissionFeed.class)); String ftId = "_gJZX8O62EeCXN_lW5l3omQ!_N4cF4ZuwEeCwk5wyBHqHrQ!designer";      //This is the formTypeId of our workflow. q.setStringCustomParameter("ownerId", ftId); q.setOrderby("$updated");                     //Order the submissions by Date                SubmissionFeed sFeed = service.getFeed(q, SubmissionFeed.class); int totalLeaves = 0;                          //Counter for total number of leaves taken by the employee.

More info about this section

  • In these lines we are creating a submission query in q.

  • Instead of getting all the submissions for all the forms and flows owned by the designer user, we will get the submissions only for our workflow by adding the formTypeID filter to this query as explained in Getting Started with the Data API - Java Client Library Tutorial: Filtering

  • You can get the formTypeId for this flow by looking at the Share URL of this flow. For example, if the flows URL is: http://<server:port>/frevvo/web/tn/tutorial/user/designer/app/_N4cF4ZuwEeCwk5wyBHqHrQ/flowtype/_gJZX8O62EeCXN_lW5l3omQ/popupform?locale=, then the bold part of this URL which follows the flowtype is your formTypeId.

HTML for Vacation Reports Table

  1. Add the HTML to create our vacation reports table structure:

      <div id="bd"> <div id="workarea">            <h2>Vacation Report </h2> <table border="1" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="0" width="50%"> <thead> <tr> <td><b>Start Date</b></td> <td><b>Number Of Days</b></td> <td><b>Type Of Leave</b></td> <td><b>Approved/Denied</b></td> </tr> </thead> <tbody>
  2. Now to display the leave records under this table, we will get all the submission records from the SubmissionFeed. Then we get the Submission XML for all the submissions and parse it to get the relevant data from each submission. Add the following in your showReport.jsp file:

    <% //Loop over all the submissions for (SubmissionEntry entry : sFeed.getEntries()) { if(entry.getState().equalsIgnoreCase("SUBMITTED")) {     //Consider only those submissions which are in Completed, that is in Submitted state //Get the submission XML Link dLink = (Link) entry.getDocumentLinks("text/xml").get(0); String linkRef = dLink != null ? dLink.getHref() : "";                                      GDataRequest request1 = service.createLinkQueryRequest(dLink); request1.execute(); InputStream responseStream = request1.getResponseStream(); try { // Parse the submission XML (using the XMLContentHandler class which has SAX Parser configurations) XMLContentHandler xch = new XMLContentHandler();; xch.parse(responseStream); Map<String, String> submittedControlMap = xch.getParams(); if((submittedControlMap.get("EId").equals(uId)) && (submittedControlMap.get("StartDate").contains(Integer.toString(Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.YEAR))))) { //Get only current year's submissions and for only a particular employee      if(submittedControlMap.get("IApproveThisVacationRequest").equals("Approved")) //Check if the Leave was approved or not totalLeaves = totalLeaves + Integer.parseInt(submittedControlMap.get("NumberOfDays"));                                          %>
  3. Once the submission passes all criteria we need to print it in our HTML. For that, we add these lines. (Note the character sequences <%= and %> which enclose Java expressions, which are evaluated at run time.)

                                                  <tr>                                               <%-- Print the extracted data --%>                                                      <td><%= submittedControlMap.get("StartDate") %></td>                                                      <td><%= submittedControlMap.get("NumberOfDays") %></td>                                                      <td><%= submittedControlMap.get("TypeOfLeave") %></td>                                                      <td><%= submittedControlMap.get("IApproveThisVacationRequest") %></td>                                                                                                   </tr>                                       <%                                                              }                                                       } catch (Exception e) {                                                              e.printStackTrace();                                                      }                                               }                                       }                                       %>                                               <tr>                                                      <td colspan="4"><b>Total Leaves Taken: <%= totalLeaves %> </b></td>                                               </tr>                                       </tbody>                                </table>                        </div>                </div>         </body> </html>

     

     

  4. Save the showReport.jsp file and re-start frevvo.

  5. Browse: http://localhost:8082/submission-report-tutorial/showReport.jsp?username=demoemployee in your browser and see the vacation report for demoemployee.