ASP.NET Cookbook

11.2. Consuming a Web Service

Problem

You need to use a web service created by another group in your company to access data your application requires.

Solution

Add a web reference to an existing ASP.NET project using Visual Studio .NET. Create an instance of the web service class in your application and call its methods.

To add a web reference to an ASP.NET project in Visual Studio .NET:

1. Select the project in the Solution Explorer, and then select Add Web Reference from the Project menu.

2. In the Add Web Reference dialog box, enter the URL of the web service you want to consume, as shown in Figure 11-3, and then click the Add Reference button.

Visual Studio .NET will create all of the files needed to consume the web service.

After adding the web reference, create an instance of the web service class and call its methods in the code-behind class for the page. Example 11-8 through Example 11-10 show the .aspx file and VB and C# code-behind files for an example we’ve written to create an instance of the web service class from Recipe 11.1 and call its methods.

Figure 11-3. Adding a web reference

Discussion

Visual Studio .NET makes consumption of a web service a trivial task by creating all of the plumbing for you. You don’t have to worry about creating proxy classes and the SOAP messages; it’s all done for you when you add a web reference.

In our example that illustrates the solution, the web service ...