Question

I have a .Net web application that needs to interact with a Java-based system via SOAP.

I have not worked with web services other than some basic WCF and would appreciate any guidance on this.

Basically, I was thinking about creating a WCF proxy client to connect to the SOAP web services. The system is a 3rd party Java-based system that provides a SOAP interface.

The sample code provided used wsdl to generate the proxy, but isn’t that before the times of WCF?

UsernameToken aToken = new UsernameToken("root", "root", PasswordOption.SendPlainText);

MetadataService.MetadataService aMetadataService = new MetadataService.MetadataService();

SoapContext aContext = aMetadataService.RequestSoapContext;

aContext.Security.Tokens.Add(aToken);

String aXmp = aMetadataService.s_getXmpFromRecordID(wAssetId.Text);

Any suggestions?
Thank you!

Answer 1

The WSDL is all you need to generate a client proxy for the web service. And no, this is not before the times of WCF. WSDL was designed specifically for this purpose.

The simplest solution is to use svcutil to create the code.

You call svcutil with the WSDL of the web service and you get back the client code along with the configuration for it.

You then call the operations of the web service as methods on the client instance. It’s as simple as that!

For example, lets consider a basic web service like this one: http://www.startvbdotnet.com/web/sample2.asmx (it’s basic math exposed as a web service which I found by google-ing).

To generate a client for this I would use svcutil like so:

svcutil http://www.startvbdotnet.com/web/sample2.asmx?wsdl

This command will generate the Sample.cs and output.config files (the code and configuration for the client).

You add these to your project (along with needed assemblies like System.ServiceModel and System.Runtime.Serialization) and now you can call the web service with code like this one:

using (SampleSoapClient proxy = new SampleSoapClient())
{
    Console.WriteLine(proxy.Add(6, 2));
    Console.WriteLine(proxy.Substract(6, 2));
    Console.WriteLine(proxy.Divide(6, 2));
    Console.WriteLine(proxy.Multiply(6, 2));
}

WCF makes things easy. Adding security is also simple with use of proper configuration or attributes on the service classes.