Extract data from a web service?

The dashboard can connect to excel, textfile and ODBC sources. It doesn’t have a direct connector to web services. Most web services are transactional in nature so do not provide the bulk data that is normally required for business intelligence systems.

If by change there exists a web service that supplies a bulk data extract then it would be possible to write a short script using whatever programming environment is supported by the web service API to extract the information into a textfile before loading it into the dashboard.

Sometimes there are other methods available, for example the Salesforce.com information can be extracted via ODBC using a 3rd party plugin supplied by DataDirect.