December 1, 2001 - Determining the Web Service's Input and Output Data Types | WebReference

December 1, 2001 - Determining the Web Service's Input and Output Data Types

Yehuda Shiran December 1, 2001
Determining the Web Service's Input and Output Data Types
Tips: December 2001

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
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When calling a Web service, you need to first find out what parameters the Web service expects, and in which format they need to be represented. Let's take the echoService example. Let's further assume that we are interested in the echoString method. You search for the string "echoString" and find the relevant operation:

  <operation name="echoString" parameterOrder="inputString">
  <input message="tns:echoStringRequest" name="echoString" /> 
  <output message="tns:echoStringResponse" name="echoStringResponse" /> 
  </operation>
Searching further for the echoStringRequest and echoStringResponse message definitions yields:

  <message name="echoStringRequest">
  <part name="inputString" type="xsd:string" /> 
  </message>
  <message name="echoStringResponse">
  <part name="return" type="xsd:string" /> 
  </message>
From the definition above you see that the input string and the returned string are both of the type xsd:string. The prefix xsd denotes the XML Schema Reference, i.e. the standard definition of XML by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).