RE: Biztalk Connecting to As400

> The thing im finding really frustrating is that there is barely any
documentation on pulling data from a satasource into a webservice every
book and tutorial I have looked at never cover using databases which
suprises me somewhat as I would've thought it is an ideal thing to use a
web service for.

I am not a .NET programmer, but I am assuming a data source would be the
same as an SQL result set. Once you have your data, putting it into your web
service depends on how you decided to implement your web service.  There are
two ways I do web services and I describe them below.

Program Call Style (a.k.a RPC)
This kind of web service interfaces a .NET object more directly in that it
will have an input and output parm (except if a method didn't return a
value) for each method within a .NET object. This is where SOAP (Simple
Object Access Protocol) comes into play. Essentially SOAP is used to make a
call to a .NET method from a Java method transparent (put any two
languages/entities you want in there. It is not limited to .NET and Java)

So if I have a Java program that accepts an integer and outputs a string
(customer address lookup for instance) then the WSDL would describe that
parm list so it could be consumed by a .NET program.  The .NET program
(through Visual Studio) can do a Ctrl + Space to get the available methods
of that Java object and the valid values that can be passed into the
different methods.

Document Literal Style
This is similar to RPC in that you will still be calling an end method, but
the data type is almost always a String that contains an XML document of
some sort. Once the SOAP call is made and the end program has received the
XML, it will then parse the XML and finish its processing.  From the other
perspective, if you have a data source you want to output (say serialize)
and are using document literal then you would compose XML (using string
concatenation if you wish) and specify the variable containing the XML when
calling the SOAP method of the WSDL document you have already built.

Maybe the better question to ask is this: Do you have your WSDL (Web
Services Description Language) document defined? In your case it would be a
WSDL document developed from the .NET web service that has the data source
in it.  Once the WSDL is developed for that .NET web service Biztalk can
consume it.

HTH,
Aaron Bartell


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Rohan Sootarsing
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 9:36 AM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [WEB400] Biztalk Connecting to As400

The thing im finding really frustrating is that there is barely any
documentation on pulling data from a satasource into a webservice every
book and tutorial I have looked at never cover using databases which
suprises me somewhat as I would've thought it is an ideal thing to use a
web service for.
I think the problem I am having is that the actual webservice isnt
populated with any fields/nodes until the query is submitted so
obviously biztalk cannot see these.

Thanks for all your pointers so far would it be possible to email me
when you get your as400 webservice up and running it would be
interesting to look at

Rohan


>>> albartell@xxxxxxxxx 08/06/2005 15:20:32 >>>
It sounds like you already know a .NET language and how to build a web
service end point in Visual Studio, so that is the direction I would
keep
going until you can get the full loop working.  At that point if you
decided
that having .NET in the mix isn't right you can move to Java to process
the
XML and do the talking to DB2.

Biztalk can get busy quick.  I would recommend building a full loop
process
that doesn't have any complication built into it but instead is just
for the
purpose of unit testing the connections to all machines/programs
involved.
In effect just build a hello world web service that goes from Biztalk
to
your .NET web service.  Put plenty of console messages in the process
so you
can see exactly where the process is stopping. 

One thing that I do when working with remote communication is write
everything you receive into the .NET web service out to the console.
That
way you know exactly what is being sent and can then determine how to
process it.  Sometimes it is hard to get to the raw HTTP request with
all of
the high level tooling in the IDE's these days.

After you have that written then start building on that knowledge and
add in
content.

HTH,
Aaron Bartell

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On
Behalf Of Rohan Sootarsing
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 8:50 AM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
Subject: RE: [WEB400] Biztalk Connecting to As400

Yeah something like that,
I have nothing on the iseries itself yet waiting for the request
I know nothing about the as400 i have been having to wing this
I have a file on the as400 which i have build a .net webservice to
access using the .net provider and a sql query. This works fine when I
test it in ie and returns all the data from the as400 file however
when
i try to connect to this webservice it can only see the dataset node
of
the xml and nothing else im guessing this is because all the other
nodes
are generated on the fly.
I Would be interested in learning more about setting up a listener or
this webservice you talk about on your site.
I will be very grateful for any help you can give me 

Regards
Rohan Sootarsing


>>> albartell@xxxxxxxxx 08/06/2005 14:30:16 >>>
Just so I am understanding you here.  You are trying to send an XML
request
from Biztalk to an iSeries machine, correct?  What is waiting for the
XML
request on the iSeries?

You need to have some sort of service (FTP, HTTP, SMTP) on the iSeries
waiting for the XML request. An interesting product I evaluated awhile
back
that allowed Biztalk to make requests direct to RPG programs is called
Attunity (http://www.attunity.com/). Check out their Attunity Connect
product.

If you are looking to create an RPG XML Web service check out my
XMLSAX
parser at http://mowyourlawn.com. Use that coupled with an RPG CGI
program
to create a "Biztalk Listener" on your iSeries.

HTH,
Aaron Bartell

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

On
Behalf Of Rohan Sootarsing
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 3:35 AM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
Subject: [WEB400] Biztalk Connecting to As400

Hello,
I have created a webvservice to connect to as400 
however im having problems connecting to this from biztalk 
I was wondering if anyone had managed to connect biztalk to as400

Thanks in advance 
Rohan


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