Top Five Things to Know About Modeling Web Services

You should know the following five things about modeling Web Services in the Business Data Catalog:

Your modeling depends on the behaviors of the methods that are provided by the Web service, and how they are programmed.
To determine what methods are provided by a Web service, look at the proxy generated by WSDL.EXE.
Make your choices for Finder, SpecificFinder, Association, and other methods by comparing the in and out parameters of the different Web methods.
For each entity, you should identify the fields that uniquely identify an instance of that entity. Without an identifier, the Business Data Catalog cannot uniquely identify an entity instance. The data returned by a back-end application method is just a blob of data without identifiers. Only if the returned data also has identifiers can the data have semantic meaning in the Business Data Catalog, and only then can you implement actions, search on, and crawl the entities.
Name child TypeDescriptor entities by using the name of the Microsoft .NET Framework accessor in the .NET type referenced by the parent TypeDescriptor. You can find these .NET types in the Microsoft Visual C# proxy generated by WSDL.EXE. Note however that the child TypeDescriptors of TypeDescriptors that have the IsCollection flag set can be named anything.

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