Web Service logging calls, charging and revenue

[Ric Castagna]

Greetings, all...

I almost hate to admit how long I've been looking for the answer to
this question without much success. I've seen articles alluding to
charging for web services (such as MapPoint) but have not seen
anything on how to implement this.

Obviously, I need to be able to assign some measure of
username/password to the people that are going to subscribe and pay
for this web service.

Then, I need to be able to track the number of times they call the Web
Service, and, finally, I'll need to be able to extract that
information in order to collect the revenue based upon usage.

I work in ASP.NET with VB as the code-behind. Hopefully someone out
there has run across this same type of situation and will be willing
to share the knowledge.

Thanks in advance,
Ric Castagna

 

[Dino Chiesa [Microsoft]]

If you are familiar with custom attributes, you can add an attribute that
you attach to each of your webmethods.

Here's an article on SoapExtensions that can do it
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/e...bServicesProtocolsSoapExtensionClassTopic.asp

But you don't need the full SoapExtension. You just need to include
chargeback on each method call.
for example, this article describes examining only in the After Deserialize
phase:
http://www.developer.com/net/net/article.php/11087_2192901_2

-Dino