Special Edition Using SOAP

Using Complex Data Types

Databases use a large number of data types. In fact, you might find that SOAP doesn’t support all of the data types for your DBMS. This means that you’ll face data conversion issues that could affect the performance of your application to the point that handling thousands of transactions per day becomes difficult.

The following sections address the issue of using complex data types within your application. We’ll begin with an overview of the problem with working with complex data types. The next section will show how various WSDL generators handle the problems of working with complex data type. The last two sections show you a complex data type example.

Understanding the Problem

You need to consider two issues for data ...