Like any kid with a new toy, I find it a little hard to resist having a play – so this evening I decided that I would expand my mind with research and experimentation… J

I had a quick look through the H5 Development Guide and discovered that it is a little thin on information – infact it’s very similar to the M3 Smart Office development guide – but it provides us with some clues about what we can do.

And in this instance, I was wondering how hard it would be to call the M3 APIs from within the Javascript as this is something I do for many customers scripts and I was wondering if I would need to pass authentication information. As it turns out, once I stopped trying to work with a broken API , it’s pretty simple as we can examine the H5 generated code to get some good clues about how it works.

So what I’ll do is show you the process that I went through and some example code – I haven’t got a nice code pattern, and I haven’t really done much on web development so apologies in advance…

I decided to use IE, it has some nice debugging tools. So I went in to the H5 client and opened OIS300, then like I’m sure 90% of people (I’m sure), I opened the developer tools

Which gave me something like this. The DOM Explorer being very interesting as I could start looking at how the webpage was constructed. Scrolling down I noted some M3 REST calls to the APIs, specifically MNS410MI.LstRoles

And I found the apiBaseUrl further up the document

So now I had a method to call the APIs – but processing them, well…I didn’t really have the time or inclination to search the web, so scanning through the code in the DOM explorer I found the function getCustomizationRoles referenced a couple of screenshots above.

So now we have the code to process the returned API results.

I wrote a little code to ensure that the nameValue[j].Name related to the field name returned from the API and the nameValue[j].Value is the actual value – which it was.

Now that we have some useful information and I moved on to call a simple API, CRS008MI.ListFacility – it will list the facilities, and if you supply a facility it will list the facilities from that point onwards. Something nice and easy.

I also wanted to present the information in one of the H5 pop up dialogs – which is helpfully documented in the H5 Development Guide.

The result is this:

And the code (it needs to be saved as sacTest.js and you need to associate it to a panel as sacTest):

// a test script to call a M3 API
// and display a message box
var sacTest = new function()
{
	
	
	this.Init = function(scriptArgs)
	{
		var host = scriptArgs.controller.ParentWindow;
		var cont = scriptArgs.controller;
		var args = scriptArgs.args;
		var el = scriptArgs.elem;
		var debug = scriptArgs.debug;
		
		var content = cont.RenderEngine.Content;

		debug.WriteLine("sacTEST script was called");
		
		// this is the our actual call to the REST services
		$.ajax(
		{
			url:'/m3api-rest/execute/CRS008MI/ListFacility?FACI=IFL', dataType: 'json', success : function(miResult) { processItems(miResult, debug); }
		}
		).error(function(e, msg) { debug.WriteLine("error: " + e + " " + msg); });
		
	}
	
	// process the items that are returned
	function processItems(result, debug)
	{
		var miRecords = result.MIRecord;
		
		if(null != miRecords)
		{
			var strOutput = "";
			for(var i = 0; i < miRecords.length; i++)
			{
				var nameValue = miRecords[i].NameValue;

				for(var j = 0; j < nameValue.length; j++)
				{
					// look for the FACI or FACN fields
					if("FACI" == nameValue[j].Name)
					{
						strOutput += nameValue[j].Value + " ";
					}
					else if("FACN" == nameValue[j].Name)
					{
						strOutput += nameValue[j].Value + "<br>";
					}
				}
			}
			// display an information dialog box
			ConfirmDialog.ShowMessageDialog({dialogType: "Information", header : "PotatoIT!", message: strOutput});
		}
		else
		{
			debug.WriteLine("No records returned");
		}
	}
}