Publishing the AR System functionality as a web service

Web services provide a simple, platform-agnostic method for application integration. By using standard messaging protocols and service definitions to support computer-to-computer interaction over a network, web services allow application integration regardless of the hardware or software platforms and independent of the programming languages in which the applications are written. Web services enable  functionality to be available over the web (publishing), and enable  applications to access third-party applications. 

You publish a web service to make  functionality available over the web by creating a web service object, associated forms, and optional workflow.  developers can use a web service to make  operations (such as submit, modify, and query) available to other applications. Web services that are published in  can be very basic (for example, creating a record in the  database) or more complex (for example, processing a purchase order that spans multiple forms).

You consume a private or public web service to obtain external information for use in an  application by creating a form and an associated filter that uses a Set Fields action.

The following web services are installed with :

• User web service
• Group web service
• Roles web service

You can use or customize these three web services to allow external applications to find, create, and update entries in the User, Group, and Roles forms. These web services are also defined in the SystemWebService.def file, located in the ~InstallForm/en directory.

Each web service consists of the following resources:

• A base form on which it operates. You specify this form when you create the web service. For web services that span across multiple  forms, the base form is the master form.
• A list of Create, Get, or Set operations. When you create a web service, by default, it has these named operations: OpCreate, OpGet, OpList, and OpSet. You can have multiple operations of the same type, or you can have no operations of a particular type.
• A mapping that specifies how individual elements of incoming and outgoing XML documents are mapped to fields and forms of the . These are essentially the input and output parameters of the web service.
• An association with XML Schema (.xsd file). Global elements and complex types referred to in the schema can be used in mappings associated with operations.

You can consume an external web service by creating a Web Service Set Fields filter action to enter data from the web service into a base form. You can then view the form in an  client. The Web services support only the Unicode characters that are supported in Apache Xerces.

The following sections provide information about using web services with . They describe how to publish the  functionality as a web service and how to invoke external web services to exchange data between  and web service applications.