BDE access through web services

A Business Data Entity (BDE) business interface of LN consists of collection of related business data and the methods to access this data. On the LN server, the exact implementation of the BDE is hidden and may consist of any combination of DLLs and database tables. The public interface, however, shows a standard behavior and appearance.

The public layer of a BDE interface exposes the business data to external applications and is message-based. This implies that an external application can access the BDE by sending a request message to this BDE, and that the BDE on the server can reply to this request by returning a response and a result message to the client. These messages are XML documents that conform to a BDE-specific vocabulary. The data and functions of this public interface are described in a WSDL file. LN provides this WSDL file, in a repository, to external applications.

The Connector for Web Services implements a web application to run web services with which you can access BDE business interfaces. A BDE web service performs the message-based communication with the BDE in the following way. The web service receives a SOAP message from a web client, converts this SOAP message into a BDE-specific XML message, and sends this BDE message to the server. The LN application on the server forwards this message to a BDE implementation and thus invokes one of the methods of the BDE interface. The BDE interface replies by returning output for the invoked method in another BDE-specific XML message. This BDE response or result message is sent back to the web service, which converts it into a SOAP message and then forwards the SOAP message to the web client. The format of the SOAP messages that are sent to and fro are completely defined by the WSDL file of the BDE web service.

Note: For more conceptional information about BDE interfaces and their XML-based method arguments, see the Infor Integration 6.2 - Integration Guide for BDE Clients. Notice that the solution to create web services for BDEs discussed in this guide refers to the Web Services Toolkit of Infor Integration 6 and does not apply to the Infor Enterprise Server Connector for Web Services.