Please note, the rptdesign file and sample graphics files that can be used in trying this project for yourself are available for free download from
http://www.BIRTReporting.com<br />
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INTRODUCTION<br />
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One of the most frequent questions I have been asked through my work with the BIRT User Group UK and BIRTReporting.com is “how can you use web services as data sources within BIRTâ€. This seems to stem from the fact that one of the data source options within the BIRT designer is the Web Service data source, but there seems to be little information out there on the net to really walk people through how to create an actual example. This project, which you can follow step by step, aims to correct that.<br />
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In this example we are going to create a report which reads a list of email addresses from a source database. So this might be your customer or prospects database and you may be using a report like this to periodically “clean†the list of invalid email addresses. For each email address that we read we want to use an online web service to check that the email address is valid and return a graphical result. The web service we are going to use actually returns a textual result, so whilst this would have been good enough, I wanted to go one step further and include the additional principle of dynamic images just to add a little spice to the mix!<br />
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Download the pdf for the full tutorial.
