IBF @ a Glance
In this article, I would like to share my test lab in using IBF (Information Bridge Framework) to access WebMethod in XML Web Service. You might have seen the beauty of IBF in Office, what you might haven't seen is the process on getting IBF hooked with the data source.
1. Deploy Your Web Services
Basically you can use a different kind of metadata in IBF, whether it's a Web Serice, Metadata Service, XML File or .NET Assembly. In this example, I already create a Web Service : Student.asmx
The web services has a simple GetStudent WebMethod that will give you information of certain student based on the studentId paramater. Of course, you can refer to database or any other method on how your web service getting the student information. For the sake of the lab, I intentionally hardcoded the student information result from whatever input of parameter that the webmethod given.
Here, you can see the XML result of the GetStudent using XML namespace "urn-STUDENT-Data" and all of its element (StudentNumber, StudentName, Address & City)
2. Creating an Information Bridge Metadata Project
The Information Bridge Metadata Designer tool is an Add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003. The key components to the Metadata Designer are Metadata Explorer and the Metadata Guidance windows. In the following steps, We will import the metadata of Student Web Services, creating metadata service and building user interfaces.
Metadata Guidance is a tools that you'll likely use to perform most of IBF configuration. You can activate the guidance in View - Others Windows - Metadata Guidance in VS 2003.
3. Importing Metadata
4. Creating Service-Level Metadata
By using Web Service WSDL (Web Service Description Language), IBF able to determine the service operations & schemas of Web Service offer. You can create the service level metadata from Metadata Guidance Windows
5. Creating the User Interface
To start building the UI, you use Region Creation Wizard in the Metadata Guidance Window. At the end of the wizard, you will have an option to use a standard HTML or a windows form based User Interface.
When the wizard finish, a new UserInterface project will be created, as you can see it's a windows form based UI based on the selection above.
IBF Metadata Designer also allows you to test and debug solution without using Microsoft Office. For more on test & debugging with IBF, refer to the “Building and Debugging a Solution” walkthrough in the Metadata Guidance window.
In IBF Metadata Explorer, navigate to the ShowStudentDetails action node and perform the Build and Execute from right click. Following is the input reference. Remember, since my webmethod always return the same information, no matter what parameter I pass through - the result remain the same. In reality, this is not the common scenario/behaviours.
The Result :
