Main IOS services

The IOS provides many services for the Lawson system. The most important of these are the Transaction, Data, and Drill services. These services process the exchange of data between the Lawson Portal (as well as other products such as the Lawson Add-Ins for Microsoft Office) and the Lawson application programs and the database.

Transaction Service

The Transaction service replaces the Application Gateway Service (AGS) from earlier Lawson technology releases. It processes the requests for Adds, Changes, and Deletes from the user interface. It does this by creating a message that converts the requested form data from XML into a format that is readable by the 4GL application. After the data has been updated by the 4GL application, Transaction converts the message back into XML.

Data Service

The Data service provides dynamic, read-only access to Lawson data. Upon request from a client (for example, a user running the Lawson Portal), the Data service makes calls to the database and returns the requested data ensuring that security rules are enforced. The Data service retrieves data and sends it back to the requesting client in either XML or CSV format (default is XML). It does not support data updating. The Data service replaces the Data Mining Engine (DME) from earlier Lawson technology releases.

Drill Service

The Drill service is the service that supports the Drill Around feature. Drill Around is a Lawson feature that permits users to make read-only data requests across multiple data files (as defined by application rules that have been implemented for the drill call) while maintaining security on the data. The Drill service replaces the Internet Drill Around (IDA) from earlier Lawson technology releases.