Modifying the soap body for web services.

[Elixir]

Hello, I'm having a bit of trouble with a .NET webservice. I'm creating a webmethod called getItems which will accept and return the following data in a soap envelope from sql server. I'm just curious as to how to force the web service to return the soap data in the format following, currently the data is formatted differently. The methods and their functions will now be explained:

The getItems webmethod will return all publications added or edited between two dates. This must only return publications data.

4.1.1 Request
The proposed request method would have the following input parameters:
• Fromdate – UTC date format
• todate – UTC date format
• filter – publications
4.1.2 Response
The response would return the following in XML format for each publication wrapped in a <document> tag:

• Uniqueid – id from publications table
• title - publicationTitl e
• date – last edited date
• url – url for pdf
• area - Area of Expertise
• country – region
• pubdate - publishedDate
• type - ???

The soap document should contain the following in the soap response body:
<document>
<uniqueID>123 5</uniqueID>
<title>Anothe r Publication</title>
<date>946513000 </date>
<url>http://www.sjberwin.co m/clientpublicati ons/a1235.pdf</url>
<area>Real Estate</area>
<country>France </country>
<pubdate>946514 000</pubdate>
<type>Letter</type>
</document>

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[tlhintoq]

Straight out of a textbook....

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[Frinavale]

Elixir,

Please research your problem before posting your question.
A great place start your research is the MSDN library. This library is a bunch of articles and documentation provided by Microsoft about anything to do with .NET development. I recommend that you bookmark the resource for your future reference.

In the MSDN library there are a lot of articles about Web Services.

When you first start learning about Web Services you have to understand that they use SOAP for transferring data from the client to the server (unless you're using a RESTful Web Service, but I don't want to confuse you so I'll just leave this topic alone). SOAP is just a fancy XML document. Normally we (as humans) don't want to be writing SOAP/XML documents because it's pretty boring stuff that can be very time consuming to do...So we have created classes that will create the SOAP/XML for us. These classes use the Document Type Definition (DTD) to generate valid SOAP/XML responses.

In other words, you do not have to force the web service to return a SOAP response in any format other than the one that the web service returns. If you start messing with this it's very likely that your SOAP is going to be invalid.

Just learn the concepts of XML, SOAP and DTDs so that you know what's involved with transferring information between the web service and the client and then don't mess with it. (Until you need to secure it).

-Frinny