.NET and web services

is this a good way to round-trip customer info?

[bgirl]

Setting up a customer response form, with data captured into an Access database (no SQL server installed). Is using .NET's web services a good way to round-trip this info back to the client? (client has ftp access to the web server, but not that tech savvy and really shouldn't be using it... browser is better for them). Do web services expose too much private data for what is essentially an intranet?

[TheNige]

WebServices only return what you want it to. They are essentially functions that return some type of data in an XML format. Certain things can be returned by a web service such as datasets or simple strings, integers, etc.

It is up to you to decide what to return.

[Easy_Coder]

-->Is using .NET's web services a good way to round-trip this info back to the client?

If your customer needs to port the data into their own systems then yeah you have a candidate for a web service. Especially if the 2 systems (yours and theirs) are disparate.

Assume for a moment that your customer has a Client Application that reports on the data your webform collects; and that today you provide this data to your customer with a spreadsheet or a copy of the access database which your customer manually loads into their data systems.

In this scenario a web service makes sense for you and your customer allowing your customer to now subscribe to the data and stuff it into their own data systems to be extracted by their Custom Client Application.

If your customer is not technical you'll probably have to build the web service (hosted on your side) and the subscribing application (hosted on their side). The subscriber would call the web service and persist the results into their data systems. You could also integrate the subscriber right into the Client Application.

TheNige is right, it's totally up to you as to what you want to expose.

Check out XML for ASP.NET Developers [Paperback] by Dan Wahlin. It's a pretty fast read that will get you up to speed quickly. I picked up a used copy for $8.