Introduction of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) .SVC web services
This topic describes some of the difference between the deprecated .ASMX and the new .SVC web services
Starting from release 10.0 the API calls can be accessed by Windows Communication Foundation(WCF) .SVC services which support claims-based authentication and replaces the deprecated .ASMX web services.
- Differences in parameters
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- No AuthenticationContext parameter
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Since claims based security standards drive all the WCF .SVC web services, the AuthenticationContext parameter was removed.
For more information about how to authenticating for WCF .SVC web services, refer to the topic about Authenticating users through the API.
- No typed parameters
- The parameters described in the classes are the typed parameters which are used by the .ASMX web services. The parameters used in the .SVC web services don't have a "ps" prefix to indicate that it is a string parameter or a "psOut" prefix to indicate that it is a output parameter of type string.
- No empty result
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Since the
Web Services 2.5throw an exception, they don't return an exception number in the return parameter anymore. However theWeb Services 2.5.ASMX web services still return an empty string for backwards compatibility. With the introduction of the new .SVC web services, we have removed that empty result. As a result, the only output parameter might become the result of a function instead of the output parameter of the procedure.
- What are the .SVC web services URLs?
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The URLs of the .SVC web services have the following structure:
The following table provides some examples:<web service URL>/Wcf/<API version>/<classname without version nuber>.svcClass name ASMX SVC Application 2.5 Application25.asmx Wcf/API25/Application.svc DocumentObj 2.0 DocumentObj20.asmx Wcf/API20/DocumentObj.svc DocumentObj 2.5 DocumentObj25.asmx Wcf/API25/DocumentObj.svc Publication 2.0 Publication20.asmx Wcf/API20/Publication.svc PublicationOutput 2.0 PublicationOutput20.asmx Wcf/API20/PublicationOutput.svc PublicationOutput 2.5 PublicationOutput25.asmx Wcf/API25/PublicationOutput.svc User 2.5 User25.asmx Wcf/API25/User.svc ConditionManagement 1.0 ConditionManagement.asmx Wcf/API/ConditionManagement.svc ...