Destype and desname parameters don't work properly

Question

Hi,
We have a j2ee webApp that uses oracle reports to run reports. One report in particular could be really long and slow (b/c it contains lots of dynamically generated jpegs) depending on what parameters a user chooses. So for this report, we'd like it to run asynchronously, notify the user when it is finished, and store the pdf on that user's local machine. So our report url looks like this:
http://appServerHostName:portNumber/WebApp/rwservlet?report=someReport.jsp&server=ourServer&destype=LOCALFILE&desname=$TMP/test.pdf&cmdkey=someKey&desformat=pdf&ENGINERESPONSETIMEOUT=50&NOTIFYSUCCESS=[email protected]&NOTIFYFAILURE=[email protected]&background=yes&ourSpecificParameters...
I got the first 2 things working by doing background=yes&notifysuccess=someEmailAddress
However, I can't get the report to be downloaded to the user's machine after it's done running. I've tried:
1) destype=localfile&desname=$TMP/test.pdf
2) destype=localfile&desname=C:\temp\test.pdf and other ways.
I also tried to see if I could store the pdf on our UNIX appServer:
destype=file&desname=$TMP/test.pdf but that didn't work either.
No matter what I set destype to (localfile, cache, or file), the pdf ALWAYS gets stored on our appServer at $ORACLE_HOME/reports/cache and the name of the pdf gets derived from the value of desname plus some 8-digit random numeric string. So in the 1st case above, the generated pdf was:
test25136488.pdf
And in the second case, the C:\temp\ wasn't interpreted as a directory, but as part of the filename so the result was an ugly filename:
C:\temp\test14257852.pdf
This is only a problem for us for this 1 report (and possibly others in the future) b/c our other reports typically run pretty fast so the user can just wait for the pdf output to pop up in their web browser.
Any help on how to get destype and desname working properly (or if you have a better solution for dealing with really time and memory consuming reports) would be much appreciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hello,
The behaviour of DESTYPE=LOCALFILE is not the same for rwclient and the reports servlet :
http://www.oracle.com/webapps/online-help/reports/10.1.2/topics/htmlhelp_rwbuild_hs/rwrefex/cmdline/common/bld_destype.htm
It is not possible to save an ouput returned by an URL automatically with a browser.
If you want something automatic, you have to use a free utility like curl or lynx
http://curl.haxx.se/
http://lynx.isc.org/lynx2.8.5/index.html
or write a small application in java. There are many examples on the web :
http://www.devdaily.com/java/edu/pj/pj010011/index.shtml
Learn how to download the contents of a URL
using Java's URL class
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javatips/jw-javatip34.html
Java Tip 34: POSTing via Java
Learn how to POST data to Web servers in Java
http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.net/Post.html?l=rel
e135. Sending a POST Request Using a URL
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/networking/urls/readingURL.html
Reading Directly from a URL
Regards