IBM Data Web Services (DB2)

With the IBM^® Database Add-Ins for Visual Studio, you can use the IBM Data Web Service Designer to create IBM data Web services that expose database operations (SQL SELECT and DML statements, XQuery expressions, or calls to procedures and functions) to client applications.

Web services accept XML messages or URL-encoded parameter strings as requests for database operations. (In the rest of this documentation, XML messages and URL-encoded parameter strings are both referred to as "messages," except where a distinction between the two is necessary.) Web services return results and result sets in XML messages. For operations that perform SQL inserts, updates, and deletes, Web services return a count of the number of new, changed, or deleted rows.

A Web service performs the following actions when it receives a message that contains a request:

Looks in the message to determine the requested database operation.
Extracts the input parameters from the message.
Prepares and executes the statement.
Retrieves the result of the operation.
Generates the output XML message that contains the result.
Sends the output message to the requesting client application.

XML messages that request an operation and XML messages that return the results of an operation are tagged according to a default XML schema for each operation. This default schema performs the following functions:

Maps input and output parameters to XML tags
Maps columns to XML tags
Maps SQL data types to XML data types
Maps Web service operations to XML tags
Provides the general structure of input and output messages

After you create a Web service and save it, the designer automatically deploys the Web service to a local Web server. Web services are deployed as Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) Web Archive (WAR) files.

See Also