Understanding the Service Manager Web Services

Every Web service published by Service Manager is a document-literal service. The documents which are used for the requests and replies are derived from the dbdict definition of a single Service Manager file and published via the fields section of the extaccess record.

Each field in the Service Manager data model must be understood in the context of the business logic for the application that defines the data. Before approaching any Web Services consumption project, it is important to understand the data model that is implemented within the Service Manager instance you are targeting. Because Service Manager allows you to add new fields, change the validation of fields or make fields mandatory, every Service Manager implementation will have a slightly different data model and business logic, and each difference has to be reflected in the published Web Service to ensure successful processing.

Web service definitions are maintained in the Web Service Configuration Utility. In this utility you can see how file names such as probsummary are aliased to Incident, how fields within files can be exposed for purposes of Web Services; and how they are aliased to more appropriate names. Finally, the Web Service Configuration Utility is where XML schema data types such as dateTime can be applied to individual fields. The default type is string, but Service Manager fields can be mapped to various XML schema types if needed.