Stateful Web Services

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• Download demo project - 16 Kb

Introduction

Web Services allow several operations to be published at a single end-point.

However, it may be a scenario that more than one operation may be required to be invoked, in a specific order, and an internal state need to be maintained.

Scenario

Let’s take a concrete but simple example for demonstration.

There is a service called MathService that publishes two operations Add and Subtract.

Add operation requires two integers are parameters and returns an integer – result of addition of values to the two parameters.

Subtract requires just one parameter. It returns the difference between the result of last operation - addition or subtraction - (by the same client) and the value of parameter passed.

As an example, first call to Add with values 4 and 5 returns 9.
Then, a call to Subtract with a value of 3 would return 6.
Next call to Subtract with a value of 10 would return -4 and so on.

How can this web service be modified to maintain the state?

Solution

For extreme cases, one must look at the Web Service Transactions Specification.

I am providing a quick-heal solution. But the same idea can be used in any web services that require maintaining states – not only by one service but multiple services.

I would modify the Add operation to return two items – the result of addition and a unique token.

I also modify the Subtract operation to take an additional parameter – a token that would be used to internally track the data.

It is required since for every operation invocation, a new instance of the class representing the web service is created. Using the unique token, the data would be cached on the server side.

The implementation of the cache is what remains in question. I am using an inbuilt implementation for the cache for MathService – using the HttpRuntime Cache. Persistent caching may be provided using databases and other dependencies.

[WebService(Namespace="http://www.edujinionline.com/ns/samples/webservices/")]
public class MathService : WebService
{
   [WebMethod]
   [return: XmlElement("result", typeof(int)),
        XmlElement("token", typeof(string))]
   public object[] Add(int x, int y)
   {
      int z = x + y;
      string token = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
      Cache cache = HttpRuntime.Cache;
      cache.Insert(token, z, null, Cache.NoAbsoluteExpiration, TimeSpan.FromMinutes(30));
      return new object[] { z, token };
   }

   [WebMethod]
   [return: XmlElement("result", typeof(int))]
   public int Subtract(int y, string token)
   {
      Cache cache = HttpRuntime.Cache;
      object obj = cache[token];
      int x = 0;
      if(obj != null)
      {
         x = (int) obj;
      }
      int z = x – y;
      cache[token] = z;
      return z;
   }
}

The web service is ready to be deployed and tested.

You can download the source code and test client to see how all this works!

Output may appear as shown below:

You can also visit web-service related blog at Eduzine^© - electronic technology magazine of EduJini, the company that I work with.

Summary

One can have stateful services without going into nitty-gritties of Web Service Transactions, or using WSE to modify the Head of the Envelope or to rely on cookies that some enterprises disallow.

Note:

You may need to update the web reference for the web-service in the client. I used 'File System' for ASP.Net application and the Web-Server was on port 1073. Update the reference for your case.