We have a job management application running (Access) with the database in SQL Server 2005. A third party is going to provide job information to us, which they make available as XML via an SSL web service using a REST style interface. The service needs to be polled automatically on a regular – 5 or 10 minutes – basis. The XML data needs to be pulled back and loaded into holding tables for onward manual processing – i.e. the problem is really confined to retrieving the data and loading it into tables.
I have complete access to the server and I can, within reason, deploy any software I wish.
I’m looking for advice as to my options for simple, reliable and robust methods of approaching this. Unfortunately the third party company effectively supplies no example code beyond a PHP class. Deploying PHP on the server is an option but the default PHP install on Windows does not support openssl, and I’d prefer a more elegant approach anyway.
What are my options?
The simplest way would be to write a bit of C# code to call the REST service and write the data into staging tables. Create this code in a Console application and run it periodically using Task Scheduler.