SOAP is a data interchange standard supported by many development environments. A SOAP payload consists of an XML document, known as a SOAP envelope. A SOAP request envelope contains the SOAP operation (a SOAP service) and specifies all appropriate parameters. The SOAP service parses the request envelope to obtain the parameters and calls or selects a stored procedure or function just as any other service does. The presentation layer of the SOAP service streams the result set back to the client within a SOAP envelope in a predefined format as specified by the DISH service's WSDL. For more information about SOAP standards, see  http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/.

By default, SOAP service parameters and result data are typed as STRING parameters. DATATYPE ON specifies that input parameters and response data should use TRUE types. Specifying DATATYPE changes the WSDL specification accordingly, so that client SOAP toolkits generate interfaces with the appropriate type of parameters and response objects. For more information about how data types are formatted for client applications, see Accessing variables in result sets.

The FORMAT clause is used to target specific SOAP toolkits with varying capabilities. DNET provides Microsoft .NET client applications to consume a SOAP service response as a System.Data.DataSet object. CONCRETE exposes a more general structure that allows an object-oriented application, such as .NET or Java, to generate response objects that package rows and columns. XML returns the entire response as an XML document, exposing it as a string. Clients can further process the data using an XML parser. The FORMAT clause of the CREATE SERVICE statement supports multiple client application types. For examples of other formats supported by SOAP services, see HTTP web service examples.

 Example

CREATE SERVICE SampleSOAPService
    TYPE 'SOAP'
    DATATYPE ON
    FORMAT 'CONCRETE'
    USER DBA
    AUTHORIZATION OFF
    AS sql-statement;

 See also