Recipe 6.4 Consuming XML Web Services
Most web services developed in the past few years have been written to return the result using XML representation. XML, being an extensible language, has been the language of choice for many developers as it is ubiquitous and is supported by almost all computing platforms. This recipe shows you how to parse the XML result and extract the information you need.
Solution
To illustrate how you can connect to a web service and then parse its XML result, this example uses the Dictionary web service at http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx. This web service enables you to check word definitions. For this example, you use the Define method to check the meaning of a specified word. This web service supports the following methods of access: SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, HTTP GET, and HTTP POST. For simplicity, this example uses the HTTP GET method.
Figure 6-6 shows the information you need to send (top part) to the server and the result (bottom part) returned from the server.
As you can see, the web service returns an XML string containing the result of the service call. In particular, the definitions of a word are contained within the various <WordDefinition> elements. Hence, your task is ...
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