I'm having a really hard time trying to find a resource or online tutorial that explicitly walks you through setting up a WF4 workflow activity that can call out to an external web service. All the videos and online samples I've come across simply demonstrate how to consume a web service that's part of your Visual Studio solution, but my situation entails calling out to a web service on a non-Microsoft server.
I have a service reference added to my VS2010 workflow console project for the web service in question, and it's pointing to the WSDL of the external web service. So far, so good (I think). I have a very basic workflow sequence, using a SendAndReceiveReply workflow control to communicate with the external server, and I believe I have the Send piece configured correctly. The ReceiveReplyForSend is giving me trouble, however, and I'm not sure if I have its Content options set up the right way. I'm invoking an operation called FileCheck, which at the moment for testing purposes always returns a value of 1 like this:
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope>
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<FileCheckResponse>
<FileCheckResult>1</FileCheckResult>
</FileCheckResponse>
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>
If I try to run this, however, I get the error "Badly formed SOAP message." For what it's worth, my ReceiveReplyForSend has a single parameter set up called FileCheckResult, though I don't know if that's the correct way to get the above value.
I can put a breakpoint at either activity, but I have no idea how to see what the SOAP call looks like at that point. Can someone either give me some workflow Send/Reply debugging tips or point me in the direction of an excellent step-by-step tutorial of how to consume an external web service in WF4?
Update on Feb. 2, 2011: Thanks to Maurice's suggestion, I see exactly what is failing now. The web service call in my workflow is failing because Visual Studio is generating a reference to the wrong namespace in my workflow Send call. Here is the single bit of XML that is wrong in the SOAP message - I'll leave off the rest of the SOAP envelope for succinctness:
<FileCheck xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
This is what the WCF Test Client generates, which gets a successful message in return:
<FileCheck xmlns="http://someserver.org/test/" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
This is probably a really newbie question, but is there a setting somewhere that I'm overlooking that adjusts the xmlns value? I tried searching for "tempuri" in my project, but it's nowhere to be found, so I bet I'm overlooking a default setting somewhere.
Update on February 8, 2011: Maurice's latest tip did the trick! I needed to add the proper namespace to the ServiceContractName property for my Send workflow activity.
Adding a reference to an external web service is not much harder than one that is part of the same VS2010 solution. Only in this case you need to provide the URL where VS2010 can find the web service WSDL. As the communications mechanism is standard WSDL and SOAP there should not be a problem in calling the other service.
If you want to debug messages the best tool to use is Fiddler. It will let you see messages on the wire and even build request on the fly. If you have an existing client that can work with the service in question you can monitor its messages and compare them with the messages you are sending. Provided the service doesn't use complex and custom data types the WCF Test Client is a good way to check if the service responds with a standard .NET client app.
The SOAP namepsace is part of the ServiceContractName. Use the following syntax
{http://someserver.org/test/}FileService
Related
Around a year ago I made an iOS application that finds restaurants near your location of any type and displays information about them. I made a web service call using the FourSquare api to get all the data which was returned in json format and then I parsed it and displayed the information on the UI of the app. Now I want to make an android application using Xamarin.Android since I am learning working with Xamarin studios and C#. When I make a Xamarin.Android application and go to packages then add packages I see there is a Foursquare api package that has a .NET wrapper around it. Here is the website url:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Foursquare.Api/
So my question is how does this work? Does adding this package mean I don't have to make a web serivce call anymore, instead all the data is stored inside this package and I just have to get all the data the same way I get information from a local database? What are the advantages of using this package instead of just making a web service call to Foursquare?
Think of it this way:
This Foursquare API is simply a .NET wrapper of the web service that you want to use. Thus, somebody has gone ahead and done all of the hard work for you so you can simply consume the returned data in your applications.
What does this mean for you?
Well it means that you don't have to write any REST consumption code and you can focus more on the actual application and any business logic that you need to implement based on the Foursquare objects.
To not confuse any further, this data would come the same way as if you wrote your own web service to access the data from the Foursquare API endpoint.
Advantages:
Already written for you
You don't need to know your way around their REST API
Usually follows best practices per language so it's easy to consume (Objects created, methods, etc)
Disadvantages:
REST endpoint might be updated and not reflect in the package until it's updated
Any bugs/issues in the framework can be hard to workaround if the project is not open source
Could be a lack of documentation on how to use the wrapper
I am trying to build my own WOPI host using ASP.NET MVC and its WebAPI functions according to this example
https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/office/Building-an-Office-Web-f98650d6
I successfully used that example to connect to my Office Web App Server and I can use that to access files of Excel and PowerPoint in local path and I am able to edit it, but I cannot use it to open word document in editing mode as the Post action handler isn't implemented completely without any response so that it cannot handle any edit request.
In order to add support for editing of Office document, I tried this example with POST request handler based on Cobalt library extracted from Office Web App Server.
https://github.com/marx-yu/WopiHost
With this example I managed to edit ans save all kinds of document with Office Web App Server. However, when I tried to integrate these two together I found that even if I can enter the edit window of Excel and PowerPoint and I can see that Post Requests from Office Web App Server like locking and Cobalt are handled by my WOPI Post API action handler. Those change doesn't take any effect on my local file at all. Moreover, I still cannot edit word document and when I checked the back log of Office Web App Server, I found the error message is Cobalt is not supported while I have already set the SupportsCobalt in CheckFileInfo response to true! Any help is very appreciated!
I think I have exactly what you are looking for. Check out my implementation of the WOPI host. It's an MVC6 app that takes the best from the both examples you are referring to and adds some extra features.
I am trying to consume a SOAP web service into a cocoa application. The return value which is printing in the log is an HTML error page.
My Main objective is to pass two parameters to the web service and get a value in response. Can anyone please suggest correct way of achieving this?
It could be any number of things. For startes: you may be hitting the wrong URL, you may be sending invalid data and the server is not returning a valid error. The best thing to do is check what you are doing against any docs you may have, then contact the person working on the server side of the project for help debugging.
I know that is not a very specific answer, but I don't have a lot to go on. Hope it helps.
I've run come across a behavior with HttpWebRequest that I believe is intended, but as I have not been able to find any source that definitively says this is correct, I thought I would post it as a question and see if anyone has encountered this and/or can verify this is correct.
For starters I have an MVC3 app running on IIS 7.5. It has 1 controller and supports 1 post method. I have Windows Auth and ASP.NET Impersonation enabled within IIS. The idea behind the MVC3 app is just to have a simple service that can be used for logging information from a variety of client applications(console apps, silverlight, asp.net, AJAX, etc). One of the things the service does is uses the User property from the controller to also log who the person who posted data to this service.
To simplify the processing for the consuming applications I created some client libraries, Silverlight, DotNet, and a js library.
This all worked out as expected except when using the DotNet library within another MVC3 application. For the DotNet library I'm using an HttpWebRequest and using the asynchronous methods (Begin/EndGetRequestStream)/(Begin/EndGetResponse) to post the request. I'm also setting the .Credentials on the request to CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials, but when the logging application starts the processing of the request from another MVC3 app it shows the User as the service account of the app pool from which the post was received.
When I found this I added a synchronous version of the post to the DotNet library and found that the logging service was using my personal credentials.
I assume that HttpWebRequest could be using different DefaultCredentials depending on the context in which it is used. Since this is asp.net and the async method of the request are being called, my library code may not have even finished before the client MVC3 app has returned a response.
What I haven't been able to find is if this is definitively the case or not. If anyone has and answer or or an article that could point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks in advance
What I was encountering was intended behavior. The root of the problem comes down to under which identity do threads from the .Net thread pool execute when servicing the asynchronous requests. In my case the threads were executing as the owner of the app domain that was created by the app pool. In my case it was a service account.
I was able to capture the identity of the impersonated user prior to the start of any asychronous processing and use the WindowsImpersonationContext to force my library code to run as the impersonated user. By doing this CredentialsCache.DefaultCredentials used my credentials(impersonated user) instead of the account running the app pool when setting it on the HttpWebRequest instance.
I have a windows service that is supposed to send e-mails periodically.
Next to the windows service project there is an MVC 3 project that is sending e-mails with MvcMailer (beautifully).
I want to use the same engine to send e-mails for the windows service.
How should I do it?
Import the MVC binaries and create one controller and new views for this purpose? Will it work?
Saving it in the database and requesting my web project to send the e-mail might not be the best solution because the information is the result of a query and is too big to be sent in the request.
The only other option I see is to simply request the web project to do all the work but this way it wouldn't be beneficial to place the windows service in another service to save the site application resources.
How would you do it?
As an alternative to MVC Mail, ActionMailer.NET can now be used stand-alone outside of MVC.
The details are covered here
http://geeksharp.com/2011/07/06/actionmailer-0-6-released/
I would argue that calling a mvc mailer from the service might be an overkill. If the mvc project is supposed to expose sending the email API for all of your other solutions, then building a REST api might make sense. However, if you just want to bring the functionality of the action method to the windows service, then i would choose an in-process functional component. If you can refactor the logic of the mvcmailer action method into another assembly why not just do that and then include that assemlby as a depedency in your windows service solution.
If you can provide the over all purpose of the mailer and how it's used in the web scenario, it may help us to provide a better architecture.
Why do you think the query to send to mvcmailer us too large? If you have the mailer MVC project already working and exposed via a restful URL, that becomes your email service and simply call it as a web request from your service.
You can get around size constraints in your request That shouldnt be an issue.