[Building Sakai] external access to named reports

[Gregory Guthrie]

I need to setup a scheme whereby I can regularly generate a set of reports across all local source sites automatically on a regular basis.
Using the GUI point-and-click navigation for it works but is not scalable or practical.

I have gone through several iterations of input on the users list, and from that am now creating some external database queries that mimic the reports. I got some very helpful advice from there, but someone also suggested that I ask here about using a webservice for my task.

The basic idea was to create my own (new) webservice to generate the reports. I will investigate that, but the initial overhead of learning and setting up a development project and doing that coding is too high right now.

Instead, for now I was wondering about two other options; one is to use an existing webservice, the /direct/sitestats-report/describe URL service certainly sounds relevant, but I couldn't yet find any documentation or examples of its usage. Is anyone using it that could point me to some examples or documentation of its usage?

The other is - I have three pre-defined and named reports, and see that they are defined in an XML format in the database. Could I get any examples where someone has used the internal APIs in Sakai to run a named report like this?

Thanks for any pointers or hints to existing usage of these things.
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