how to communicate with a web service

[torhenrik]

Hi,

I have a problem I hope someone can help me with. I have an application, made in Delphi 2010 that needs to communicate with my customer's ERP system. To do this, the guys who sold my customer the ERP system have created a web service. I am now in posession of this web service, but I have to admit I don't know where to start in communicating with it. So my question is this: Can anyone point me in the direction of some useful tutorials or show me the basic in how the communication works?

 

[TonHu]

What type of webservice, SOAP/XML, REST, RPC, WebSocket?

 

[torhenrik]

How can I tell?

The web service contain three directories: Bin, My Project and App_Data. The two latter is empty. On the root there are two files, an asmx-file and a config-file. In the bin directory there are some dll-files, a pdb-file and a xml-file. This is made for a Windows environment.

 

[TonHu]

The supplier should give you some documentation on how to use their service. They should at least tell you the type of service it supplies, and if it's discoverable or not (SOAP usually is, REST usually not, RPC/WebSocket are never discoverable, AFAIK).

 

[torhenrik]

I have send an email to the developer. Hopefully he will answer me tomorrow.

 

[torhenrik]

It is SOAP

 

[TonHu]

Delphi 2010 does support the discovery of a SOAP Web Service, AFAIK. I don't have D2010 available, so can't tell from first hand. There should be some kind of wizard available from the IDE to generate the local stub for you, and you then just call the right methods on the stub, to be transferred to the actual system, executed and results returned (RPC-like).

You can usually discover the SOAP service using IE (not with Firefox or Chrome) by appending ?wsdl to the url they have supplied to you. Depending on the SOAP libraries used, there are testing options available, so you can try out the actual service. YMMV.