This is one of those blogs that has been sat in my to-do folder for an age and I have just never got round to dedicating some time to research and write up.
With the ongoing rise in cloud offerings I feel Web Services will start to play a bigger part in integrating segregated cloud instances and put a potential link between the on-premise and cloud world, you can already see this with the EPM Automate utility which is an integral part of PBCS and is built on top of the Planning REST API, soon there will additional functionality in the API to integrate with the Business Intelligence Cloud Service.
In the near future FDMEE will include hybrid functionality to pass metadata or data between on-premise and cloud applications and will no doubt be using Web Services in some form, there is also going to be DRM integration which is built on top of the already available Web Services.
Most of the core EPM products do have Web Services available which are using either REST or SOAP methods and recently I covered the Planning REST API which you can read about here and here, I thought I would continue the theme and start to look at what is currently available in other areas starting with Essbase Web Services.
Essbase Web Services were introduced in 11.1.2.2 and to be honest since they were made available I have not read or heard much about them so my assumption is they are not being widely used.
There are probably a number of different reasons why this is and here are some ideas I have:
Did not know they existed
Not got around to looking at them
Not sure what they can offer
Had difficulty setting them up
Documentation was poor so didn't bother.
See no added value in using them.Hopefully I can address some of those reasons if you feel you can relate to them, I definitely can relate to the Essbase WS documentation being very poor and when you can compare it to the documentation for the Planning REST API you realise how little effort has been put into it.
I am going to split this into two parts and in this first part I will cover get up and running with the Web Services and go through any pitfalls or bugs, in the second part I will go through some of the functionality with examples.
This is going to be based on 11.1.2.4 but it should be similar in 2.2 and 2.3 because the Web Service have not really changed since they were first released.
I am going to try and keep it simple as the intention is just to give a taste of what is available and then let you decide if you want to progress.
The 11.1.2.2 Provider Services new features document provided the following information:
Essbase Web Services
Web services are self-contained, modular applications that one can describe, publish, locate, and invoke over a network. Web services allow access to regular applications using a Web browser. Web services use XML to code and decode data, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to transport it. Web services are defined using WSDL (Web Service Description Language).
Essbase Web Services will expose Essbase user and administrative functionality in a services-oriented (SOA) environment via Provider Services, and allow Essbase to be easily integrated with both Oracle and third-party applications
Essbase Web Services support access to and administration of Essbase applications and cubes. Essbase Web Services include the following modules:
Datasource
Administration
Data and Metadata QuerySo basically the Web Services are using SOAP which is not my preferred method as I am much more of a fan of REST due to the ease of use and nowadays REST seems to be the more popular choice, within EPM you can see the swing towards REST with Planning, DRM has a new mobile functionality using REST and HPCM has switched in 11.1.2.4 from SOAP to REST. When the Essbase Cloud Service arrives my assumption is that it will have a new REST API but we will have to wait and see.
The Essbase Web Services are split into three modules and each are defined by their own WSDL which provide different operations, if you read the documentation you will not really find out about what the operations do.
There are examples that are available which need to be installed and are Java based, If you are going to use Java then I am not completely convinced to why you would use the Web Services over using the Essbase Java API via Provider Services but anyway to install the samples you need to run the EPM Installer.