Web Service : problem calling it from PDF.

Question

Hi everyone,
I want to make a call to a web service created by SAP/ABAP.
I have the wsdl file and I created a new data connection in the Adbobe designer.
I draged and droped the data connection to the editor : so it created
2 text fields and a button.
The web service waits from the user to enter an input string and it gives back as an answer a string as output...simple, isn't it ?
I also added a button in the designer that points to the connection I created. The button is in mode "execute".
Finally, I saved all this in a PDF file.
When I double click the PDF file, I enter a string as input and press the button....Then I go an error message saying that I should specify username and password. So I changed the mode of the button from "Execute" to "Submit". I added to the URL my username and password because the web service points to a backend which is SAP.
Now I do get another error message which is : Cannot handle content type:text/xml; charset=utf-8.
I read in the doc that maybe I should use XDP ?
Can someone please explane me how to solve the problem.
Thanks in advance for the precious help.
Thanks in advance.
Regards.

Answer 1

The problem is caused by the fact that your web service is returning a content-type header of text/html. The reader product can only handle PDF responses from a web server. In any case, your form data is received OK by the web service; it is just the response back that Acrobat cannot handle.
To get around this, I created a little "thank you for your response" PDF file and put it on my web server. I then set my perl CGI backend script to send a simple redirect to the PDF when it gets a response. (Obviously, you would want to harvest the form values from your user before redirecting). This solved the problem for me.
My little perl script is shown below:
#! /usr/bin/perl
use CGI;
$query = CGI::new(); # invoke a new CGI object for the input
@params = $query->param();
# do something with the values....
print $query->redirect(-uri => 'http://mycompany.com/myapp/cgi-bin/thankyou.pdf');