DONE: Ability to send HTTP POST requests

Question

Our main ERP system (along with many other programs/services these days) has an API that uses HTTP POST requests to allow integrations with other programs.

Along with the new webrequest feature, this could open dbFront to a new level of integration with external resources.

Comments

@Daniel, I knew this was coming ;)

Answer 1

dbFront 1.3.2.2081 extends the WebRequest action so that it allows you to send Get, Post, Head, Put and Delete requests.

In addition you can now include:

• Request Headers including fields and expressions.
• Request Body which can also resolve fields and expressions.

WebRequest has also been updated to allow receiving Binary object which it can pass to a stored procedure, save in a Blob field, or display on screen. This has been tested with the API provided by CraftMyPDF and it works extremely well.

dbFront provides 4 optional fields to save or for the Stored Procedure call.

• {%webrequest_status%} - Returns the Status Code as integer or text depending on the field type.
• {%webrequest_contenttype%} - Returns the result mime type, e.g. "application/pdf"
• {%webrequest_data%} - Returns the Text, Json, or XML data
• {%webrequest_attachment%} - Returns the Binary/Blob data

dbFront can also optionally indent any received JSON.

Answer 2

In case it helps anyone else... I found this code sample from Microsoft that adds GET/POST functionality to SQL Server with a CLR function/procedure.

It still would be better to have this functionality at the front-end to avoid consuming database server resources, but our load is light enough that it should work for now.

https://github.com/microsoft/sql-server-samples/tree/master/samples/features/sql-clr/Curl

Comments

Thanks for this suggestion.  It is even better because the database server can make the requests without any direct user involvement as different data events happen.

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Fully agree that this is a good solution.  I've done similar to read/write files to disk, or to download/upload files via FTP/sFTP etc.