Tag Archives: essbase-web-services

WSDL XML tweak for Essbase Web Services for C#/Service Util

I just thought I’d make a small post on an issue I have encountered with Essbase Web Services. I also mention this during my webinar on the matter. If you use the svcutil.exe program to generate a set of proxy classes based on the WSDL file for Essbase Web Services, you’ll get an error.

At least as it pertains to the DatasourceService file, you need to make a small change. Here’s the problem line:

<xs:element default="DBALL" minOccurs="0" name="cubeAccess" type="tns:CubeAccess"/>

The problem is that it’s trying to set a default value for the CubeAccess property, but DBALL isn’t defined in the enumeration for this type. Here it is from later in the file:

<xs:simpleType name="CubeAccess">
 <xs:restriction base="xs:string">
 <xs:enumeration value="NONE"/>
 <xs:enumeration value="FILTER"/>
 <xs:enumeration value="READ"/>
 <xs:enumeration value="WRITE"/>
 <xs:enumeration value="CALC"/>
 <xs:enumeration value="DESIGN"/>
 </xs:restriction>
 </xs:simpleType>

There’s no DBALL in the above. We can actually just comment out the above line in the file or delete it all together to remove the reference to a non-existing enumeration value. I haven’t seen any problems from doing this. I’m hesitant at this point to try and introduce DBALL as an enumeration value since that doesn’t technically exist in the Oracle definition of the server, and I’m not sure what the right way to go in terms of setting a default value might be (i.e., should it be NONE or READ or other?).

In any case, for the purposes of proxy generation from the Visual Studio tool, just removing the reference seems to do the trick. Here’s what the commented line looks like, just for the sake of completeness:

<xs:element default="DBALL" minOccurs="0" name="cubeAccess" type="tns:CubeAccess"/>

Just tonight I verified that this issue seems to still exist in EPM 11.1.2.3.

That all being said, it’s possible that I’m just totally missing something there – perhaps an option on the proxy generation I need to turn on or something else, but I do know that commenting the line gets me to where I can successfully use the tool. If you’re more familiar with this than I am then please let me know if you have some advice.

Thoughts on my Kscope Session ‘Practical Essbase Web Services’

My session went alright. I asked the audience to please be gentle on account of my first time presenting the deck and the material. They were quite gentle. I’d like to give a big huge shout out to my favoritest Essbase peeps in the world on Team Kroger for all coming and cheering me on.

My big takeaway from the audience was that a demo would have been helpful. Duly noted. I didn’t think there’d be time but the session actually came in a bit under time so there’s definitely a way to retool it and include a demo with real code and a real working example. So if I run this deck again I’ll be sure to incorporate that.

Many people were also very thankful for my apparent candor about the technology. I start off with a high-level overview of the available technologies for practically getting data out of of Essbase and come to the conclusion that while Essbase Web Services have a use case, it’s not one that I will personally be likely to use. This is largely due to my large investment in the infrastructure for Saxbi Server, which is based on the Essbase Java API.

One of my more recent thoughts about EWS is that it’s probably something that is largely intended to be used internally by Oracle and was something they knew they could clean up a bit and toss over the fence for other people to leverage. As I mentioned in the presentation, I hit some bumps in my research and will hope to see them cleaned up in future releases. Now that I have names with faces of a few more Oracle folks from the conference I’ll be looking forward to providing actual feedback to them instead of just bitching writing about it on my blog.

Anyway, as promised, here is the presentation for those of you that want to skim it. The bullets might be too high-level to be incredibly insightful but if you have any questions please feel free to mail me! I am happy to help and for extensive development needs I am available to consult through my firm.  I have some related code I will clean up and get into a GitHun repository as time permits.