SharePoint BCS with SOAP web service using custom authentication

Question

I'm very new to using BCS in SharePoint 2010. I'm not really sure how to go about my problem or if it's even possible without coding a custom solution in Visual Studio using .NET.

I have a SOAP web service I want to connect to my SharePoint site in order to create a list containing students retrieved from a request. This seems like a pretty straight forward thing to achieve using SharePoint Designer and BCS.

The issue is the way the SOAP interface I'm communicating with deals with authentication (Just to clarify I wasn't the person who initially setup the SOAP service). In order to pull down this list of students I need to first call a soap action called StartWebService which takes a username and password as parameters. Then the response from this action is a session token which is used as a parameter in the GetStudentList action.

How do I deal with authenticating with the StartWebService action and using the result as a parameters in another request? Can this be achieved using SharePoint Designer?

Answer 1

SharePoint Designer wouldn't be able to do this. For your web service call, it only supports regular authentication methods, not calling another service first to get a token.

I see two options:

1) Write a custom BCS provider in Visual Studio that does it

2) Write a custom web service to act as a middle-man that does the multiple calls and presents itself as a simple web service to BCS in SPD.