Question

I am writing a common web service which will be invoked by different applications. I can foresee that some web methods should be resuable since the schema of soap request will be same. However, the response schema might be updated depends on client type. To reduce this impact of modifition, I would like to design the response as an array xml. The consumer should write its own class so that the future change of WSDL will affect previous consumer if it dose not need new array[“new data”]. I am not sure if this design is workable or not. Does anybody can share his idea or advice?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think the array idea would work if what you will ever return are simple values like name-value pairs, it might be problematic if you ever need to return data structures, as some web service consumer libraries can break in serialization when they see a complex data type that they don’t know about.