Accessing a report without being logged in?

[GP-FBD]

Hello,

I am trying to access a report that alpha anywhere generates through a regular URL. How would I do that?

Looking through the browser's network tab I see that an AJAX call gets made to http://mysite/Return%20Shipper.a5rpt (that's the name of the report) with a bunch of options and then the response that the app gets is a URI of where the temporarily generated file is located. How can I set the options so that the report has a standard URI?

What I'd like to do:

A browser request to http://mysite/Return%20Shipper.a5rpt?<sanitized sql options here> results in the server responding with a file download.

Thanks,

GP

[alexc]

Re: Accessing a report without being logged in?

Gary

One way this can be done.

create a new a5w page and in the source of the page put code to handle the request to the webpage.

for example create a5w page called ShipperRpt. Set the security of the page to always allow if security is used within project.

The easiest way is to create and call a page like http://mysite/ShipperRpt.a5w?arg1=1&arg2=1&pass=239874

Essentially you will create an api to generate a report

The Following code goes into the a5w page (Delete Everything else obviously leave the opening and closing tags of <%a5 ... %>

on error goto error_handler

DIM arg1 as n = Context.Request.QueryString.Get("arg1") 'example with url ?arg1=1
DIM arg2 as n = Context.Request.QueryString.Get("arg2") 'example with url ?arg2=1
DIM Pass as n = Context.Request.QueryString.Get("pass")

'Probably want to write some further validation code

if Pass = 239874 then
DIM args as SQL::Arguments
args.add("arg1",arg1)
args.add("arg2",arg2)

DIM filename as c
filename = file.temp_path_get()+remspecial(convert_type(*guid_create(),"c"))+".pdf"

a5w_report_saveAs("[path of report]Shipper.a5rpt","PDF","","",filename, null_value(),null_value(),args,null_value())

?http_download(filename)

end
end if

end
error_handler:

dim er as n = error_code_get()

dim ert as c = error_text_get(er)

dim erl as n = error_line_number_get()

dim escr as c = error_script_get()

dim erroras as c = er + ert + erl + escr

?"Opps Something Went Wrong"

end

** [path of report] with your on path of the report ie "C:\inetpub\App\Shipping.a5rpt" < example of Production location under IIS

[GP-FBD]

Re: Accessing a report without being logged in?

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the help. I think it /almost/ works, except that the http_download function doesn't do quite what I want it to do. Apparently http_download is for downloading things to the server?

Instead of doing http_download, I've tried to do response.redirect(filename), but that doesn't seem to want to work either :/

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: Accessing a report without being logged in?

It sounds like, then, you want anyone to download any report. If that's the case, then I presume you will have many reports that can be downloaded. So, what you really want is a list of the files that can be downloaded so one can be selected and downloaded.

If that's all true, then you can give each report a unique name and load them all into the same directory. Then, create an always allowed page and put a grid on it to allow a search. Ours looks like

rpt_select_grid.png

Then, the download button opens a window with a UX with a multiselect dropdown box and a button to do the download. Populate the download using filefind.get() to get a list of the files in the directory. Ours looks like

rpt_down_ux.png

I should note that we have thousands of projects and thousands of reports, and we have to worry about privacy, so we require a login so we know who is downloading.

[GP-FBD]

Re: Accessing a report without being logged in?

My use case is this:

We have multiple ruby on rails intranet applications and want to use Alpha Anywhere's report generation engine to generate PDFs. I can programmatically generate the PDF using ruby, but I thought it would be easier to query the alpha anywhere server to dynamically generate a PDF for a specific database record (these are basically 1 page forms) because we have hundreds of a5rpts already created.

I'd like the experience to be seamless: the RoR page should have a [Download] button which is a link to the internal alpha anywhere server with the record ID being sent as a parameter - and the alpha anywhere server should respond with some data of type application/pdf.

So far it's been puzzlingly hard to get AA to give me what I want :|

Gary

[GP-FBD]

Re: Accessing a report without being logged in?

After a bit of fiddling I got this "good enough" solution:

dim reportName as c
reportName = "<path to .a5rpt>"

on error goto error_handler
DIM id as c = Context.Request.QueryString.Get("id")

if len(id) < 1
id = "0"
end if

DIM filter as c = "id= " + id

dim options as p
options.filter = filter

DIM filename as c
filename = File.temp_path_get()+remspecial(convert_type(*guid_create(),"c"))+".pdf"
a5w_report_saveAs(reportName,"PDF","","",filename, null_value(),null_value(),null_value(),options)
data = File.to_blob(filename)

Response.Mime_Type = "application/pdf"
Response.Write(data)

File.remove(filename)
end

error_handler:
dim er as n = error_code_get()
dim ert as c = error_text_get(er)
dim erl as n = error_line_number_get()
dim escr as c = error_script_get()
dim erroras as c = er + ert + erl + escr
?"Error :" + erroras
end

Thanks Alexc!

[alexc]

Re: Accessing a report without being logged in?

Awesome work Gary

Yes you are right i admit the original ?http_download(filename) was a stab in the dark as a was press for time when i wrote the post but i thought at least contribute the code that did work. i had copied the rest of the code from a project, but in my case i actually craft an email to be sent to ensure only the authorised email receipt receives the generated report as an attachment. If your interested in this code as well let me know.

Your code will come in handy to update and expose this ability in future for me so thanks Gary

[GP-FBD]

Re: Accessing a report without being logged in?

You're welcome! I think you helped me more than I helped you :)

I would probably use SQL::Arguments and modify the definition of the report in order to prevent SQL injection since right now I think someone could do ReportName.a5rpt?id=1;DROP TABLE ReportName; and that would be quite bad.