By Bilen Imam – Consultant

One of the most powerful features of PDFs is the ability to make webservice calls to pull in information as well to send information to some back end system.

Traditional, this is done through creating a data connection through the Data View palette and binding the request and response nodes to fields on the form.

However, using databinding can be a little restrictive in the fact that you have to actually bind to atleast one field for each webservice. This could potential result in you having alot of hidden fields on your form. However, there is a way to create a webservice without having to bind to a field. The alternative allows you to make a webservice call and have the results stored in a variable instead, all done through scripting. An added bonus is that you also have the ability to create webservice calls dynamically.

First things first, you have to know the address of the webservice. You may have made it through some other server, but if you had created it using LiveCycle (i.e. a webservice endpoint), you can either hard code the address in (in which case skip to the Note), or you can dynamically establish the location of the server. However, the following instructing on how to dynamically establish the server address will only work if you are rendering the form from Workspace;

var server = event.target.URL;

Once you open the form in WORKSPACE, the server will contain an address. This address will contain the address of the server, it’ll be in a format of;

http://lcserver:8080/workspace/tksdfjh

So what you’ll have to do is to strip out the first part of the address;
myServer = server.substring(0,server.indexOf(“/”,8));

And you just tack on the endpoint to the server;
var myUrl = myServer + “/soap/services/myWebService?wsdl”;

Again, this makes it pretty handy if your webservice resides in a test server and a production server (as an example) and you’re transferring the form between servers and you don’t want to have to keep changing the address.

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Note: if your webservice is not on the LiveCycle server, and the address is the same no matter where you use the form, you can start from here
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And then once you have the address you make a connection to it

var connection = Net.SOAP.connect(myUrl);

Now once you have this connection, you can call the methods of the service using the dot notation;

var result = connection.myMethod({“paramenter1″: value, “parameter2″:value2});

Note the way that the parameters are passed in.

Now that you get the result back, you have to know what type of data is coming back (i.e., is it a complex or simple object). But you now have the ability to manipulate that object anyway you wish, without having make a binding.