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. 
   

   Note the '''username=''' parameter that is appended to this URL. This shows submissions for a specific employee. Replace 'demoemployee' with any valid user Id.

   

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.
                  }
    
           %>

   More info about this code

   • The Java code in this content will create the session for frevvo service and login to frevvo using your designer username and password.
   • We are also verifying the value of username parameter that is sent in the request URL. If a parameter is retrieved then we will display the vacation report for that user, but if the parameter value is null then we will retrieve nothing.
   • Note character sequences <% and %>. All the Java code should be written between these character sequences. We will write the Java code in between HTML tags so as to embed the results returned by API calls into this JSP page in HTML format.

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.

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"));                                          
   %>

   More info about this section

   • Here we are looping over all the SubmissionEntries in the SubmissionFeed.

   • We check if the State of the entry (that is the submission) has a value of 'SUBMITTED'. This is because there may be other submissions with states like 'SAVED' which should not be part of our report as they are not yet completed.

   • Then we get the submission XML from that entry and parse it. To parse the XML we will be using the SaxParser which is implemented in the XMLContentHandler class.

   • The parsed values are stored in a hash map 'submittedControlMap'.

   • We decide if the leave should be considered in the total leaves count for that employee by checking if:

     • The leave was taken by the user whose username was passed in the username parameter of the request URL

     • The StartDate for this leave is within the current year.

     • The leave was Approved by the manager.

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.