dumb question

[Troy]

hello,

I'm new to web services so please bear with me. Basically, I want to create
a web service that listens on port and requires authentication. After
authentication users can select data from a database by passign the TSQL
statement in the URL, they can also update and insert data. Is this
possible? if yes, are there any examples?

Thanks
troy

 

[Mujtaba Syed]

Hi Troy:

By reading your questions, it appears that you are doing standard database
CRUD (create, read, update, delete) stuff. Please do make sure (talk to
someone) that web services is _really_ required here. Web services are a
simple but misunderstood class of applications. I have seen some cases where
web services were misused leading to unnecessary complexity. In your case, I
may be wrong as I am making my judgement based just on your few lines. If I
am wrong, please pardon me.

Incase you are sure web services is the way to go for your application, here
are the answers:

Web services can be done in many ways. If you use ASMX (that is ASP.NET web
services, the most popular way), it handles the TCP port allocations, HTTP
connections, etc. for you. What you need to do is write web methods inside
the web service and call them through a proxy. Parameters passed to a web
method are passed in the body of the SOAP message. You don't require to
encode query values into URLs. This is also handled by web services
infrastructure.

As far as authentication goes, you could use IIS authentication or you could
write custom SOAP headers to implement custom application authentication.

Check out http://samples.gotdotnet.com/quickstart/aspplus/ for some samples
of web service security. This will also be available if you have the .NET
SDK.

Mujtaba.