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Do you have any tutorials or sample code for using web services as a data source?
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Joined: 30-May-2007
Location: United States
Posts: 260 		Post Options Post Options   Quote Customer Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Do you have any tutorials or sample code for using web services as a data source?
    Posted: 16-Jul-2007 at 3:07pm

I am a software architect at an enterprise license holders firm and I have some questions about some of DevForce’s functionality, particularly around Enterprise-only features.

  • Do you have any tutorials or sample code for using web services as a data source.
  • Do you have any tutorials or sample code for using DevForce to save changes to data using web services?
  • Can you recommend strategies for working with web services as the primary source of data for an application?

For some background on what I need to accomplish, the applications I’m designing do not have a relational database at their core, so I can’t model my objects from the database. Since there is no database for me to connect to, I can’t use stored procedures, either. So all that leaves, as far as I can tell, is the web services functionality of DevForce to do my modeling. I was rather surprised to find that the documentation for the web service integration says that the functionality should be regarded as beta, particularly since the website didn’t mention that fact.

  • Is there more functionality there than the user docs indicate?
  • If there isn’t more functionality, what is the plan for implementing full web service support?

If you guys could chew on those questions a bit and let me know what you recommend for using web services I would appreciate it.
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Posts: 353 		Post Options Post Options   Quote IdeaBlade Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Jul-2007 at 3:08pm

In the Advanced section of our Tutorials there are two, numbered 330 and 362, that address our support for interacting with Web services.

 
We currently do not support saving changes to Web services.  We plan to implement such support in the future but at this point in time I can't give you a definite time frame for implementing that support.
 
The text in the Developer's Guide was added at the time that our Web Services support was first added.  There are many possible sceanarios for the usage of Web services in an application built using DevForce as well as Web service applications built through other means.  The many possible scenarios have not been thoroughly tested.  We have not seen extensive problems reported against our Web service support but we do not yet consider this functionality to be mature.
 
In response to one of our customers who was looking for a way to work around our limitation of not supporting writing to Web Services "out of the box", however inelegant, one of our support engineers proposed the following solution:
 

1)       Publish your rdb based entities as a web service

2)       Caller retrieves data using currently available WS publishing functionality

3)       Caller modifies data in ADO.NET dataset

4)       Caller sends modified dataset back to a web service method (doesn’t yet exist)

5)       This ADO.NET dataset is loaded into a persistence manager similar to the way we load from the file system

6)       Server validates/verifies/whatever and returns some sort of XML package back to the caller indicating success/failure/etc. state of the process 
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