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How To: Read Primavera P6 Web Services

Primavera P6 Web Services (p6ws) provides SOAP and REST APIs to allow you to access data held in Primavera P6. P6 Web Services is often installed as part of the Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) product. You may also find that it is available if you are using Oracle-hosted Primavera P6 Professional. Third party P6 hosting services may also provide access to P6 Web Services.

Authorization

You will need to use a P6 user account to access the APIs exposed by P6 Web Services. Best practice suggests creating a user account dedicated to this purpose, although a normal user account can be used. You will need to ensure that the user account is authorized to use Web Services. This setting can be found in the EPPM web interface on the Administration tab under User Administration. The Module Access tab at the bottom of the page lists Web Services as one of the available modules.

The user account will also need to have access to the projects you wish to work with via the API. At minimum the user account will need read access, including the "Export Project Data" privilege.

Authentication

The P6 Web Services REST APIs allow for the use of Basic Authentication and OAuth authentication mechanisms. Note that the API documentation indicates that OAuth is only supported for P6 Web Services hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The type of authentication used is selected when you create an instance of the reader class, as illustrated by the examples in the sections below.

NOTE: I have not had the opportunity to test OAuth authentication with P6 Web Services. You can create an instance of the MPXJ reader class with a Bearer token, which assumes that you have managed the OAuth authentication process yourself. Please get in touch if you are using or need to use OAuth as I'd like to improve MPXJ's support in this area.

Read a Project

This example assumes the use of Basic Authentication to connect to P6 Web Services. In order to make a connection you'll need the URL of your P6 Web Services installation, the name of the database you will be connecting to, and a username and password.

By default, the path to a P6 Web Services installation will be p6ws, so for example if you navigate to https://my-p6-host/p6 to access the P6 web interface, the P6 Web Services URL is likely to be https://my-p6-host/p6ws. You may need to ask your P6 administrator to confirm this as it is possible to configure the path used.

You will need to ask your P6 Administrator to confirm the database name. This information is available via the P6 EPPM administration web pages.

Once you have all of these details, you can create an instance of the reader and retrieve a list of the available projects.

import org.mpxj.MPXJException;
import org.mpxj.ProjectFile;
import org.mpxj.primavera.webservices.WebServicesProject;
import org.mpxj.primavera.webservices.WebServicesReader;

// ...

WebServicesReader reader = new WebServicesReader(
 "https://my-p6-host/p6ws",
 "my-database-name",
 "my-user-name",
 "my-password");
List<WebServicesProject> wsProjects = reader.getProjects();

Each WebServicesProject instance contains the name and unique ID (Object ID) of each project along with the user-visible P6 project identifier (ID), the data date of the project, and finally the unique ID of the current baseline, if one has been set.

Once you have selected the project you are interested in, you can read that project into a ProjectFile instance by passing the relevant WebServicesProject instance to the reader:

// In this example, we'll just use the first project returned
WebServicesProject wsProject = wsProjects.get(0);
ProjectFile mpxjProject = reader.readProject(wsProject);

You now have access to the project data via the ProjectFile instance.

In the example above we have used an instance of WebServicesProject returned by the getProjects method of the reader when we called readProject. This is not strictly necessary, you can construct your own WebServicesProject instance which just needs to include the project unique ID (Object ID), as illustrated by the example below.

WebServicesProject wsProject = new WebServicesProject();
wsProject.setObjectId(123);

WebServicesReader reader = new WebServicesReader(
 "https://my-p6-host/p6ws",
 "my-database-name",
 "my-user-name",
 "my-password");

ProjectFile mpxjProject = reader.readProject(wsProject);

This means that you can store and manage details of the projects returned by the getProjects call in your own code, then populate a WebServicesProject instance when you need to retrieve data for a specific project.

You will have noticed that the WebServicesProject class contains the unique ID of the current baseline for the project you are reading. By default if this value is present, MPXJ will read the baseline data. If you wish to change this behavior, there is a second version of the readProject method which takes a Boolean argument allowing you to determine whether or not the baseline is read, as the example below illustrates:

ProjectFile mpxjProject = reader.readProject(wsProject, false);
In this case we're passing false for the includeBaseline argument, so the current baseline project will not be exported.

Export a Project

As well as reading a project from P6 Web Services and returning a ProjectFile instance, the WebServicesReader allows you to export a project directly to an XML or XER file. You may find this useful if you need to retain a snapshot of the project from a given point in time, or pass the project data on to another system for further processing. 

WebServicesReader reader = new WebServicesReader(
 "https://my-p6-host/p6ws",
 "my-database-name",
 "my-user-name",
 "my-password");
List<WebServicesProject> wsProjects = reader.getProjects();

// In this example, we'll just use the first project returned
WebServicesProject wsProject = wsProjects.get(0);
reader.exportProject(
    wsProject, 
    "export.xml", 
    WebServicesExportType.XML, 
    true, 
    false);

In the example above, we're passing an instance of the WebServiceProject class to the exportProject method to indicate which project we wish to export. The second argument is the name of the file into which the project will be exported. The third argument represents the type of file we wish to export, in this case we're writing a PMXML file. The finally two arguments are Boolean flags indicating respectively if we wish to export the current baseline, and if we wish to export the project as a zip file.

Note that baseline export is only possible when writing a PMXML file. If the selected file format is XER, the Boolean flag indicating that the current baseline should be exported is ignored.

To export an XER file instead of a PMXML file, the call to exportProject would look like this:

reader.exportProject(
    wsProject, 
    "export.xer", 
    WebServicesExportType.XER, 
    false, 
    false);

If we would prefer to write the project data to a zip file, the call to exportProject would be as follows:

reader.exportProject(
    wsProject, 
    "export.xer.zip", 
    WebServicesExportType.XER, 
    false, 
    true);

Finally, MPXJ also provides a version of the exportProject method which takes an OutputStream instance as an argument rather than a filename, allowing you to manage the file data yourself.

OAuth

As noted in the introduction, Oracle indicates that OAuth can be used to provide authentication for the P6 Web Services APIs when hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. At present MPXJ assumes that you have managed the OAuth process yourself and have obtained a suitable bearer token. The code below illustrates how you'd use this bearer token when initializing WebServicesReader:

// ...
WebServicesReader reader = new WebServicesReader(
 "https://my-p6-host/p6ws",
 "my-bearer-token"
);
List<WebServicesProject> wsProjects = reader.getProjects();

Please get in touch if you are using or need to use OAuth as I'd like to improve MPXJ's support in this area.