very light / portable console (DOS) web service client

[jason]

Hello.

I have a very simple web service that returns a single string with
information scraped from a dynamic web page.

I'd like to build a very light, very portable console client to run on
clients with internet access that may be running 98, may not even have
VB or .NET installed. The client sw would always be run by a DOS
scripts.

What do you recommend? How much installation/setup work on the client?

If vb, I'd be compiling the exe under .net. Would you have sample
code?

Many thianks for any help or information!

 

[Saurabh Nandu]

hi,

You can use the MS SOAP Toolkit to create Web Service client applications.
Since MS SOAP Toolkit is COM based you can use both C++ or VB6 to build your
application. No .NET runtime is required here, but the MS SOAP toolkit
libraries need to be distributed with your application.

Regards,
Saurabh Nandu
[ MVP | Author ]
www.MasterCSharp.com

 

[Dino Chiesa [Microsoft]]

if it is very light, you can just use MSXML to grab the output and manually
parse it.

For simplicity, enable HttpGet on the ASP.NET side.

here's an examle javascript file (can run via WSH) :

var cityToLookup= "Paris TX";
//var cityToLookup= "Roanoke VA";
var doc = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument");
var url =
"http://www.winisp.net/cheeso/zips/ZipService.asmx/CityToZip?city=" +
cityToLookup;

WScript.Echo("Looking up zipcodes for '" + cityToLookup + "'..." );

doc.async= false;
doc.load(url);
WScript.Echo("\nresult: ");
WScript.Echo(doc.xml);
WScript.Echo("\n");
var nodeList= doc.selectNodes("ArrayOfString/string");
WScript.Echo("found " + nodeList.length + " results:");
for(i = 0; i < nodeList.length; i++ ) {
WScript.Echo(" " + (i+1) + ". " + nodeList.text );
}