Tag: REST API

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Accessing the Office 365 Reporting Service using C#

Introduction

As with other cloud offerings from Microsoft, there is so much data and meta data being collected there is often a need for reporting on that information.  Within Office 365 administration portal you can see the various reports that are offered, however it may be necessary to pull that data into your own application or reporting tool.  Thankfully you can access that underlying data through Powershell commandlets or by using the Office 365 Reporting service.  This post will focus on a few simple example methods I used to explore the Office 365 Reporting service using C#.

Prerequisites

Visual Studio

I have uploaded the full source to github so I will not be posting the full example methods in this post, if you would like to download the full source you can get it here.  Each method has local variables for your Office 365 administrator account username and password.  One of the example methods I would like to highlight is the run_all_reports method.  This was probably the most helpful method when exploring the different reports.  This allowed me to quickly loop through each report available and dump the first set of results to an xml file.  I could then inspect each report result to see what data was available and which report data I needed to pull into my own application.

public void run_all_reports()
{
    var username = "";
    var password = "";

    foreach (var report in Reports.ReportList)
    {
        var ub = new UriBuilder("https", "reports.office365.com");
        ub.Path = string.Format("ecp/reportingwebservice/reporting.svc/{0}", report);
        var fullRestURL = Uri.EscapeUriString(ub.Uri.ToString());
        var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(fullRestURL);
        request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);

        try
        {
            var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
            var encode = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");
            var readStream = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream(), encode);
            var doc = new XmlDocument();
            doc.LoadXml(readStream.ReadToEnd());

            doc.Save($@"C:\Office365\Reports\{DateTime.Now:yyyyMMdd}_{report}.xml");

            Console.WriteLine("Saved: {0}", report);
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
        }
    }
}

The get_report_list method simple hits the service endpoint and grabs the definition of all the available reports in the api.  Note that depending on your permission level you may not see all the reports available.  Finally, the run_report_messagetrace method is an example of pulling one report and mapping it back to an object using the HttpClient and Newtonsoft Json libraries.

Conclusion

With any cloud offering today there will generally be some reporting capabilities built in, however these reports are usually not enough.  Luckily more and more services are exposing their source data through api’s.  The Office 365 reporting service is just one example of that and from the sample methods above you can see how quickly it is to get access to this data.

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Accessing Salesforce Reports and Dashboards REST API Using C#

Introduction

If you have read any of my other posts, you know I have been doing work with the Salesforce REST API.  I recently had a need to access the Salesforce Reports and Dashboards REST API using C#.  While spiking out a simple example to access the Reports and Dashboards REST API I did not come across very much documentation on how to accomplish this.  In this post I will walk through a quick spike on how to authenticate with the api and how to call it to get a report.  Full code sample can be found Here on GitHub.

Prerequisites

Visual Studio

With any access to a Salesforce API you will need a user account (username, password, token) and the consumer key/secret combination from the custom connected app.  With these pieces of information, we can begin by creating a simple console application to spike out access to the reports and dashboards api.  Next we need to install the following nuget packages:

Once these packages are installed we can utilize them to create a function to access the Salesforce reports and dashboards api.

 
var sf_client = new Salesforce.Common.AuthenticationClient();
sf_client.ApiVersion = "v34.0";
await sf_client.UsernamePasswordAsync(consumerKey, consumerSecret, username, password + usertoken, url);

Here we are taking advantage of some of the common utilities in the DeveloperForce package to create an authclient which will get us our access token from the Salesforce api.  We will need that token next to start making requests to the api.  Unfortunately, the DeveloperForce library does not have the ability to call the reports and dashboards api, we are just using it here easily get the access token.  This all could be done using RestSharp but its simpler to utilize what has already been built.

                               
string reportUrl = "/services/data/" + sf_client.ApiVersion + "/analytics/reports/" + reportId;

var client = new RestSharp.RestClient(sf_client.InstanceUrl);
var request = new RestSharp.RestRequest(reportUrl, RestSharp.Method.GET);
request.AddHeader("Authorization", "Bearer " + sf_client.AccessToken);
var restResponse = client.Execute(request);
var reportData = restResponse.Content;

Since we have used the DeveloperForce package to setup the authentication we can now use RestSharp and the access token to query the report api.  In the code above we setup a RestSharp client with the Salesforce url, followed by defining the actual request for the report we want to execute.  To make the request we also need to push the Salesforce access token onto the header and now we can make the request to receive the report data.

Conclusion

As described this is a pretty simple example on how to accomplish authentication and requesting a report from the Salesforce reports and dashboards rest api using c#.  Hopefully this can be a jumping off point for accessing this data.  The one major limitation for me is the api only returns 2,000 records, this is especially frustrating if your Salesforce org has a lot of data.  In the near future I will be writing a companion post on how to get around this limitation.

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Get All Users from JIRA REST API with C#

Introduction

I have been doing a lot of work integrating with various systems, which leads to the need to utilize many varying api’s.  One common data point I inevitably need to pull from the target system is a list of all users.  I have recently been working with the JIRA REST API and unfortunately there is no single method to get a list of all users.  In this post I will provide a simple example in C# utilizing the /rest/api/2/user/search method to gather the list of users.

Prerequisites

Visual Studio

First create a simple user object to model the json data being returned from the api.

    public class User
    {
        public bool Active { get; set; }
        public string DisplayName { get; set; }
        public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
        public string Key { get; set; }

        public string Locale { get; set; }
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public string Self { get; set; }
        public string TimeZone { get; set; }
    }

Next we create a simple wrapper around the jira client provided by the Atlassian SDK.

The Jira client has built in functions mostly for getting issues or projects from the api.  Luckily it exposes the underlying rest client so you can execute any request you want against the jira api.  In the GetAllUsers method I am making a request to user/search?username={item}  while iterating through the alphabet.  This request will search the username, name or email address of the user object in jira.  Since a username will likely contain more than one letter, as the results come back for each request there will be duplicates, so we have to check to make sure the user in the result set is not already in our list.  Clearly this is not going to be the most performant method, however there is no other way to gather a full list of all users.  Finally, we can create the jira helper wrapper and invoke the GetAllUsers method.

class Program
{
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {         
            var helper = new JiraApiHelper();
            var users = helper.GetAllUsers();
	}
}

Conclusion

As I stated above this solution is not going to be performant, especially if the Jira instance has a large number of users.  However, if the need is to get the entire universe of users for the Jira instance then this is one approach that accomplishes that goal.