RPC SOAP Programming Model

Message definitions

The request and response methods are defined as Boost Serializable types. For example if we are creating a simple Calculator webservice a request could be represented with the following struct:

struct CalculatorRequest {
	double operand1;
	double operand2;
	char operation;

	template<class Archive>
	serialize(Archive &ar, const unsigned int /∗ version ∗/) {
		ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(operand1);
		ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(operand2);
		ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(operation);
	}
};

The struct is comprised of two doubles, the operands, and a char representing the operation (* for multiplication, / for division, etc).

The calculator service response can be defined as:

struct CalculatorResponse {
	double result;
	std::string text;

	template<class Archive>
	serialize(Archive &ar, const unsigned int /∗version∗/ ) {
		ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(result);
		ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(text);
	}
}

Where result is the requested operation result, and text is the full string representation of the request.

Service declaration and definition

A service and it's various operations are represented through accesible member functions of user defined types.

The calculator example can be declared as:

class MyService{
public:
	CalculatorResponse calculator(const CalculatorRequest &request);
};

Registering the service

To register the created service in answer you can use the ANSWER_REGISTER_OPERATION to register each of the member functions you want as web operations.

ANSWER_REGISTER_OPERATION(MyService::calculator);

This will register the operation calculator. The classname (MyService) is discarded, as the project name is used instead for the service name.