SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Services Associated with MOSS and WSS

As platforms, WSS and MOSS are built on a staggering amount of reusable elements and features, which translate into a fairly large number of Web Services. Overall, there are more than 26 documented Web Service definitions, plus various Web Services for additional Application Services (e.g., for SlideLibrary functionality), and the endpoints are typically dynamically structured. That is, the access to the endpoint provides an implicit context to the location within the MOSS portal or web site. It is probably impractical to go into the detail of every single Web Service. Instead, after a brief introduction, we'll focus on the commonalities between the Web Services and how to harness them.

Tip

This chapter assumes that you are already familiar with the Web Service technology as a core concept, and know how to utilize or create a simple ASP.NET Web Service on your own. Also, this chapter does not delve into the Web Services Extensions (WSE).

There are 20 core Web Services that are associated with WSS (see Table 26-1, later in this chapter). As WSS is the heart and soul of MOSS, these Web Services provide the first level of data access. The majority of the Web Services are located at the \_vti_bin\ absolute directory, as seen in Figure 26-1. However, the services are also accessible from a relative directory as well. For instance, if there is a site in a location \sites\HR\, there would be access to the web services via \sites\HR\_vti_bin\. These directories, ...