Background
I’ve been asked to create a web service that interacts with an eCommerce application. The eCommerce application in question exposes a web service interface which the documentation defines as:
The Web Service Interface (WSI) feature is an XML-based tool that
functions similarly to an API, allowing developers to carry out a
myriad of tasks within the application in bulk, or from remote systems,
without having to make source code modifications.
Basically the WSI is an ASP.net web service that exposes one method. This method allows you to pass in an XML string that tells the application to do something.
Question
On the face of it, it appears that I’m going to be concatenating strings to create the necessary XML to send to the eCommerce application. Obviously, the idea of that makes me cringe.
Is there a better way of piecing together the necessary XML in C#?
Secondary Question (optional)
Is it just me (totally possible), or is this a down right silly way of interacting with an application?
I’d look at Linq to XML for creating the requests, with the caveat that it may save some effort for simple and repeating operations if you have some pre-made XML (I guess just strings) for the simpler tasks that may exist. No point building up the XML dynamically every second if it is just something like
for example…
On your second question, I agree with you but then again, I don’t know the full story.