USER MANUALS

Operations Tab

This tab lists the operations published by the Service.

In this dialog, you can rename the Web service (only when you are creating it), rename / delete input and output parameters, add pagination support for operations (see section Pagination Support), etc.

Creating a SOAP Web service: Operations tab

Creating a SOAP Web service: Operations tab

To add a new operation, drag a view from the Server Explorer to the dialog. The view can belong to a different database. Then, the Tool analyzes its query capabilities and generates the “candidate operations” of the Web service. These operations have these characteristics:

  • The input parameters of the generated operations correspond to the fields of the view. The return value of the SELECT operations is an array of elements. Each element of this array corresponds to a row of the view and will have one subelement for each field.

  • If the view is updateable (see section Inserts, Updates and Deletes Over Views section of the VQL Guide), the Tool generates operations to insert, update, and delete rows from this view. More specifically, it generates the following operations:

    • An insert operation with a parameter for each field of the view. The name of the operation will start with “insert” followed by the name of the view.

    • A delete operation with a parameter for each field of the view. The name of the operation will start with “delete” followed by the name of the view.

    • An update operation with two parameters for each field of the view: one of the parameters will take the name of the field and the other will take the name of the field prefixed by “New”. The parameters with the prefix “New” correspond to the new values (SET clause of the UPDATE statement). Those without this prefix are used to choose the tuples to be updated (WHERE clause of the UPDATE statement). The name of the operation will start with “update” followed by the name of the view.

You can modify the operations of the Web service as follows:

  • Rename an operation or one of its parameters: right-click on the operation or the parameter and click Rename.

  • Rename the type name of the compound parameters (register or array): right-click on the parameter and click Rename type. You may need to do this if the name of the type is very long and it affects the clients that will interact with this Web service.

  • Select the operator used to build the query sent to the Server, with the value provided for this input parameter: click on the operator beside the name of the input parameter and select the new one. This means that if you select the operator <= for a parameter P of an operation, when a client invokes this operation, the query sent to the Server will be like this: SELECT ... WHERE P <= <value>To change the operator of several input parameters at once, select them, right-click on them and click Change operator. The new operator will be applied to the parameters that can accept the selected operator. To select two or more operations / parameters, hold Ctrl or Shift and click on each operation.

Delete an operation or one of its parameters: right-click on the operation or the parameter and click Drop.

You cannot delete a parameter of an operation if:

  1. The field associated to this parameter is obtained from a data source in which this parameter is mandatory. For example, if you publish a view whose data comes from a JSON data source that has an interpolation variable in the URL.

  2. Or the view you are publishing has a view parameter.

To search for an element in the tree of operations, press Ctrl+F.

If a Web Service has operations with a lot of input and/or output parameters, Virtual DataPort will return an error when deploying the service. When the deployment fails for this reason, the file <DENODO_HOME>/logs/vdp/vdp.log will contain this message:

Internal error compiling source files

Try to divide the Web Service into smaller Web Services and deploy them again (Java does not allow to generate methods larger than 64 KB, having a lot of big operations may cause this error when deploying the Web Service).

Pagination Support

When you are defining a Web service with an operation that returns many data, you may need to paginate the results in order to avoid retrieving them all at once. With this feature, a client can request the first thousand results, then the next thousand, then… In addition, a client may be interested in limiting the number of rows returned by the Web service.

The pagination support is added operation by operation. That means that if a Web service has several operations, not all of them may have pagination support.

To add pagination to an operation, right-click on the operation and click Add pagination. The Tool will add two new parameters to the operation: COUNT and START_INDEX (these parameters can be renamed):

  • COUNT limits the number of rows returned by the operation.

  • START_INDEX skips the rows of the result from row #0 up to row #<START_INDEX>.

These two parameters are optional and if their value is not present, the operation returns all the results of the operation, at once.

If a client passes the START_INDEX and COUNT parameters, the operation will return <COUNT> rows, starting from the row number <START_INDEX> (the first row is 0)

If a client just passes the COUNT parameter and not START_INDEX, the Web service will return the first <COUNT> rows of the result.

If a client just passes the START_INDEX parameter and not COUNT, the Web service will return all the rows of the result from row <START_INDEX>.

If later, you need to remove the pagination support from an operation, right-click on the input parameters COUNT and START_INDEX and click on Drop.

Ordering the Results

By default, the operations of the Web services return the data in the order set by the published view, if any. However, if required, the order can be determined by the clients of the Web service. To achieve this, right-click on the operation and click Add order by. The Tool will add a special type of input parameter called “ORDER_BY” (this attribute can be renamed).

The clients of the Web service that want to sort the results of the operation have to provide a value to the “ORDER_BY” parameter, with this syntax:

<field name> [ ASC | DESC ] [, <field name> [ ASC | DESC ] ]*

For example, iinc_id ASC, summary DESC.

Note that <field name> has to be name of the output field in the operation and not the name of the view’s field.

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