OfficeClip Web Services allows you to interact with the OfficeClip server using a publised api. This document discusses various features of the OfficeClip api and shows example of how it can be used in real-life situation.
What is Web Services?
A web service is a piece of software that makes itself available on a web-based medium (internet or intranet) using a standardized XML messaging system. The interested party can locate the service and its public interfaces using a discovery mechanism using UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration). Web services are easy to access via many platforms because of the standarized natture of communication. more information on web services can be found at Wikipedia.
To use a web service, the client usually creates a proxy to the web service. From there on all calls to the web service is made via proxy (as if it is made locally).
OfficeClip Web Services
OfficeClip web services models every entity (e.g. contacts, templates etc.) as a table. It offers methods to read, write, append and delete from the table. The consumer of the OfficeClip web services is isolated from the internal details of how the data is exchanged between OfficeClip database and its various layers.
OfficeClip web services identifies each OfficeClip data element using a unique identifier called sid (serial id). The sid concept is similar to the guid (globally unique identifier) as used in may platforms. The sid is unique across any OfficeClip installation and is created using the OfficeClip installation serial number, the entity and the primary key of that element in the OfficeClip database. The sid is a string that is used to communicate between the web service client and the server.
Each OfficeClip entity is identified by a "service type" for the OfficeClip web services. OfficeClip is an integrated platform of many web-based applications and it has many entities (and service types). The service types are identified by integer and is used is almost all methods in the web services interface. Some service types are divided into sub types called "service sub types". The service sub types are also represented as integer. Not all operations are valid for all service types. The valid operations are specified with the help page of the OfficeClip web services. An exception is thrown if an invalid operation is attempted on a service type.