For the most part, you call Oracle Commerce Platform Web Services in the same way you call Web Services elsewhere. While the general process may not differ, it’s important that you are aware of these platform-specific features.

Security

The content you see as a response to a Web Service call depends on your access privileges. When you login using the loginUser Web Service, you provide your user identity. If session sharing is enabled, all subsequent Web Service calls in that session are associated with that identity and related role.

For more information on loginUser, see the Personalization Programming Guide. You may also want to learn how other Web Services handle the security information provided by loginUser. Such information exists in the Repository Guide and the Core Commerce Programming Guide.

Transactions

When a client calls a Web Service, the transactional behavior of the service is managed entirely on the server side. The method that is exposed as a Web Service can use standard transaction demarcation techniques, but the calling client has no control over this.

There are some practical considerations you should be aware of. If a single Web Service call attempts to perform some operation, and the operation fails, the operation can be rolled back (provided that the Nucleus method is demarcated properly). However, a transaction cannot span multiple Web Service calls so if an operation is performed by a sequence of Web Service calls, and the final call fails, there is no way to roll back the steps performed by the previous calls.

Sharing Sessions

When you create a Web Service, you specify whether it should be executed within the context of an HTTP session. Associating Web Services with a session enables an application to maintain state across Web Service calls and to use login information for security purposes.

To allow multiple Web Services to share a session, two things need to happen:

This section includes an example of a helper class that you can use to simplify cookie management. See Writing a CookieContainer Class.

RepositoryItems

If your Web Services access RepositoryItems, you need to provide a serializer and deserializer so the RepositoryItem content can be interpreted by non-Oracle Commerce Platform systems. The following Web Services transmit content that is natively stored as RepositoryItems:

The Oracle Commerce Platform includes several tools for working with RepositoryItems. To make a client able to serialize and deserialize RepositoryItems, you need to translate the RepositoryItem class into a language that’s native to your client. See Creating a Serializer and Deserializer for more information.