Question

I am setting up a web service and i’m unsure about the most efficient design..

The web service is going to be called to populate a remote website with a list of people and their associated information. So, in the database there will be a “Person” table, then other tables for nicknames, addresses, phone numbers, etc. There may be 50 “People” returned for the page.

I would think I’d want to keep the # of web service calls to a minimum.. So is the best way to just have one call, GetPeople(), which returns all People and their information in one xml? Or would I want to maybe have GetPeople() return just a list of People, then have a GetPeopleInfo() call for each person?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Will you have an opportinuty to talk a bit more with the folks using the web service? The best answer would be depend on a number of factors, including how they are using it.

The simplest soution would be to create one web service method GetPeople() that executes a query joining the Person table with the rest of the tables and returnes all of the data in one flat table. If the client is just going to display all this information in a single list/table this would be the best option all around.

If, on the other hand, the client is going to generate a list of people and then have a click through to get more detailed information on a separate detail page, they might want a GetPeople() method that just returns the names/ids and a GetPeopleInfo() that pulls back the detail. If this isn’t going to cause a performance problem on your system, this should be relatively straight forward.

I would probably build both – create a GetPeople() method that brings back all the data {as long as there isn’t so much data that transportation becomes and issue} and a GetPersonInfo() method that allows they to pull back details on a specific person. This offers your client the greatest flexibility with not too much additional effort on your part.