Reusing BusinessProcesses as RestAPI

Any business process can be reused on the web, by creating a rest api end point that calls it, and calling it.

In this article, we'll reuse a migrated report and call it from the web to return a pdf document

We want to reuse the migrated report called PrintOrder from the Northwind.Order project.

• First we'll add a reference to the Northwind.Order.dll that is in the bin directory
• We'll add a call to it in the Controllers\HomeController.cs

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return View();
}

[ENV.Web.PrintToPDF]
public void Print(int id)
{
     new Northwind.Orders.Print_Order().Run(id);
}

public ActionResult About()
{
    ViewBag.Message = "Your application description page.";

    return View();
} 

• We've added the Print method, that receives an id and in that method we called the migrated Print_Order code, and sent it the id
• We've used the [ENV.Web.PrintToPDF] attribute, which will hijack any printing that happens within the Print method, and create a pdf file and return it to the browser when we're done.

The structure of the url

The url structure that will be used here is as follow: {controller}/{method}/{id}?param1={param1}&param2={param2} In our case that will be Home/Print/10249, where Home is the controller, Print is the method and id is 10249. If the method would have received more parameters, it would use their name and values after the ? sign in the url.

We can use this method to expose any business process as an easy api that can be used from the browser

Here's the result:

A more complex use case:

In this video, we use the CRS application, and demo how we extract the complex "Pay Run" process to a simple Rest MicroService.

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