Consuming a Genus Web Service from an External Client

Web services defined and published by Genus are made available to external consumers according to the endpoint settings. Endpoints support SOAP and POX/JSON. SOAP endpoints use standard Web Services Description Language version 1.1 (WSDL). WSDL is an XML-based language that provides a model for describing Web services.

Browse Published Web Services

Using your favorite web browser you can browse the list of published web services by navigating to https://yourserver/yourdataset/services/, where yourserver is the name of your Genus Services server and yourdataset is the name of the virtual directory corresponding to a Genus Data Set. To see documentation on a single web service, click one of the web service listed or navigate to https://yourserver/yourdataset/services/yourwebservice.svc.

SOAP

The documentation for SOAP endpoints provides a simple code example describing how to generate a client proxy class and call the web service from a Microsoft .NET (Windows Communication Foundation) client. A link to the actual WSDL is also provided. The web services published with SOAP endpoints may be called by SOAP compliant clients of corresponding version.

POX/JSON

For POX/JSON endpoints the documentation provides examples with a request body and response body for both POX and JSON. A request schema and a response schema are also provided for POX.

Access the Web Service from your Application

When accessing a web service with both a SOAP endpoint and a JSON/POX endpoint, there is one URL for the SOAP endpoint and one URL for the POX/JSON endpoint.

SOAP

Depending on your preferred client platform you typically make the web service available to your client application by generating (proxy) classes based on the published WSDL.

If you are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 this is done by selecting Add Service Reference... from the Project menu. See Consuming a Web Service from Microsoft Visual Studio for more details.

If you are using a different tool than Microsoft Visual Studio you may have to add a "?wsdl" at the end of the URLs above. Consult your tool's documentation for more information.

POX/JSON

When a HTTP client posts data to a web server, it should set the Content-Type HTTP request header to tell the server what type of data format the request body contains. Likewise, it should also set the appropriate value for the Accept HTTP request header in order to tell the server what type of data format the response body should contain. The following examples shows how to send and receive POX and JSON data:

Please note that the Content-Type request header should include the character encoding used in the request body (e.g. "charset=utf8"). In the absence of a Content-Type or Accept header, XML format (POX) will be assumed.