Define the service and consume it

Question

Regarding my question, I need to consume service and do some manipulation from what i get. This includes two questions for me, basically:

1) What kind of service is that?

I dont know what kind of service is that, how do i define it, i only have a link in this form: www.somesite.com/web/pages/xml/extractxml.aspx?argument1=vaue&argument2=value. So if i navigate to this thru the browser I'm promp'ed with xml file download. What kind of sercie is that? Is this SOAP?

2) Another question is, if i know what kind of service is this, how do I consume it?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

First of all from your url - if that's the format of the url then you can not call it a so called 'service', but it's true that aspx page can return you xml, now the thing is how do you like to get the xml ('consume') through C#/VB code behind or client side with ajax, both are easy, I am giving you one short example with jQuery ajax way, you can figure out the rest -

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: "www.somesite.com/web/pages/xml/extractxml.aspx",
    data: "{'argument1': 'value','argument2':'value'}",
    contentType: "application/xml; charset=utf-8",
    dataType: "xml",
    success: function(msg) {
        //do work
    }
});    

Answer 2

It looks like custom page returning XML based on given parameters. I doubt it follows any web service principles. It looks like you would need to create your own tool to process returned XML.

I think you should contact someone from that sites administration and maybe they could tell you more.

If this would be SOAP webservice, you can add it to as reference in Visual Studio, and it will generate apropriate code to access it and you can consume it through c# code. Please refer to WCF specs.