Rob van der Meijden

When you’re creating an application which only contains webservices you’re demo to the client can be little bit disappointing. A lot of XML tags, SOAP headers and WSDL scripts, not a very slicky interface. As long as you’re using simple types in you’re interface the Internet explorer can be used to demonstrate the web service, but when you’re using complex types (as arguments!) the internet explorer only shows the interface specifications and can’t run you’re webservice anymore. 

So you can build an ASP.NET or Winform application to demonstrate the working of the webservice. Create a form, drag and drop a bunch of controls to fill the interface and call the webservice and fill the controls on the form with the information from the webservice. 

You can do this easier since the release of SP1 from InfoPath 2003. InfoPath 2003 can communicate with webservices and can handle complex types. When you create a new InfoPath form you can connect to different datasources, a webservice is one of them. 

I created an example of a webservice which accepts an array (min/max prices of products) and return an array of found products (name, stock, price and startdate). After InfoPath has connected to the webservice it interprets the WSDL file and creates (figure 1) the possibility to drag and drop the arguments en output fields on the form. With the button you can call the webservice and the results are shown on the form (figure 2). 

So after a few clicks you can test (if you don’t like Nunit) or demonstrate the webservice you’ve build with InfoPath 2003.

 Figure 1

 Figure 2