Share via

Web Services Overview

  • Article

Visual FoxPro makes it possible for you to use Web Services with your applications. A Web Service is a class (object), deployed somewhere on the Internet that you can access programmatically through normal object-oriented calls. For example, you might want to access a Web Service that returns the weather for a given city. You could use a method that returns the temperature when passed in the name of a city. You can even publish your Visual FoxPro COM server (OLEPUBLIC) as a Web Service containing information for other clients on the Internet to access.

Web Services and the SOAP Toolkit

Web services support in Visual FoxPro is provided through a set of extensions to the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 2.0. You must have the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 2.0 (or higher) installed to use Web Services. The Toolkit is included with Visual FoxPro, but is also available from the Microsoft Web site.

Web Services supported in Visual FoxPro (and by the Toolkit) are handled by the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) using a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) implementation, which is WSDL 1.1 compliant. Because Visual FoxPro extends the functionality of the Toolkit, any future changes to the WSDL specification by the W3C would propagate directly to Visual FoxPro when you upgrade to a newer version of the Toolkit incorporating these changes.

If you are publishing Web Services from your Visual FoxPro COM servers, you must have Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) installed. Refer to the Toolkit online documentation for more details on platforms supported.

For more information on SOAP, WSDL or the Toolkit, refer to the Toolkit's online documentation or the SOAP Developer Resources Web site (https://msdn.microsoft.com/soap/).

In This Section

  • Web Service Registration
    The Registration dialog box makes it possible for you to specify information to subscribe to a Web Service.
  • Calling Web Services
    You can add code to call Web Services in your source programs easily.
  • Specifying a Web Service Default Location
    When you publish COM servers as Web Services, you are prompted to specify a default location the first time you try to publish a Web Service.
  • Web Service Publishing
    The Visual FoxPro Web Service extensions make it possible for you to publish Visual FoxPro COM servers as Web Services to be accessed anywhere on the Web.
  • Web Service Deployment
    Understand which redistributable components you must use from the Toolkit when deploying your custom applications that use Web Services.
  • Using the Web Services Project Hook
    The Web Services Publisher Advanced dialog box makes it possible for you to select an option to automatically generate Web Service support files when your COM server is rebuilt. This option sets up a project hook for the project that calls the Web Service engine to rebuild the Web Service support files.
  • Extending Applications
    To extend a basic Visual FoxPro application, you can enable it to work for multiple users, take advantage of ActiveX controls and automation-enabled applications, and add international capabilities.