hi 

I want to check programatically what filters are applied for a salesforce report. Given that i ve salesforce id of a particular report how can i find what filters are applied?

I saw (from http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_meta/Content/meta_report.htm#ReportFilterItem) that "ReportFilterItem" contains  all filtering criteria. But i am not sure of how to access it. Because its not available as a field which can be queriable using soql.

it has to be dealt somehow with REST or SOAP or Metadata APIs .

I ve gone through all conversations in http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Apex-Code-Development/Is-it-possible-to-call-Metadata-API-from-Apex-code-Getting-Error/m-p/119441#M14113 which eventually ended that we can access metadata api using retrieve() .. but it ll be returned in zip format which is difficult/ not possible to deal with..

Can any body help me with this?

thanks