WebReports API

Tivoli BigFix exposes an API to help you author your own Web Reports, granting you the power to create customized views into whatever aspect of your network that you want to monitor. The Web Reports API is based on the Dashboard API, but it operates with static web-facing views of your data. These views have a file extension of BESWRPT.

The Web Reports API is based on HTML and XML, with a new interface based on SOAP. The XML defines hooks into the console or Web Reports and it has a single primary section that holds HTML. The HTML section in turn can contain anything that a browser can render. In addition to the basic browser environment, there is a library of JavaScript hooks available to provide access to various functions.

The content that is embedded in the HTML section is typically a mix of JavaScript, HTML, Flex, and Relevance expressions that are evaluated with the JavaScript function EvaluateRelevance. As soon as they are received, the results of the evaluation are embedded directly into the page and it is redrawn.

Web Reports markup is passed through a pre-processor that recognizes Relevance tags. The Relevance language uses a special class of inspectors called Datastore inspectors that can help you query and aggregate statistics on your data. These Relevance expressions are evaluated and the tag is then replaced by those results. You can also use JavaScript to evaluate Relevance and for other document object model manipulations.