Introduction

A web service is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium as a software system designed to support machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web services usually provide application interfaces accessible through a communication protocol, such as HTTP. Data and functionality exposed in a web service can be consumed by another software system.

NAV 2016 allows publishing application objects in SOAP or OData web services in several clicks. Three types of objects can be published: codeunits, pages, and queries. The first recipe of the chapter guides the reader through publishing a codeunit in a SOAP web service and exposing its global functions to client applications. The next recipe gives an example of a .Net application consuming the published SOAP service and calling its methods.

After that, we will cover several topics related to OData services and data access. We will walk through publishing a service providing access to NAV data and different approaches to retrieving the...