Checking out Sharepoint webservices

During my work the last few weeks I've been working a lot with webservices and more specific Sharepoint webservices. Eventhough you can hardly call them webservices. They are a pain a real in the ass, the APIs are bad, but the worst thing is the MSDN documentation about them: absolutely useless.

The only thing that makes working with them bearable is soapUI. This excellent, multiplatform application makes life very easy when you need to explore the webservices some product/website/application offers. Just download the standalone version or use one of the various IDE plugins. After this it is as easy as

1. Create a new project via File > New soapUI Project
   
2. Enter a project name
3. Provide a WSDL, either via a local file or via a URL to a remote service
4. Keep the Create Requests checkbox ticked
   
5. Click OK

After this soapUI will generate a sample request for all the methods present in the WSDL. Now you just have to select the method you want to test, fill in some parameters (soapUI will indicate the optional ones) and click play. That's it.

The only additional functionality that I needed to use was provide some authentication credentials using the Aut button on the bottom of a request window.

One of the more useful Sharepoint webservices that I used was the List Data Retrieval service: http://host:port/_vti_bin/dspsts.asmx?wsdl. This has the ability to return the all the fields of a Sharepoint list together with a definition of the structure of the results. Below an example of the request I used:

  
     
        1.0