Consuming and Exposing Services

This chapter focuses on how to create services in SCM and how to consume them in external applications. This does not include OData services, which were covered in Chapter 10, Data Management, OData, and Office.

The creation of services within SCM is relatively straightforward and intuitive. This is a benefit of the patterns we used when writing code; for example, the code that was written to use the SysOpearation framework has a controller that constructs a data contract and a class to process that data contract. The decoupled nature of the development patterns that are used in SCM lends itself very well to the creation of services.

SCM is a cloud-first solution, which means we need to consider security. When accessing an SCM service, we also need to ensure that the consumer has access to SCM and has permission to access that web service. Even...

Technical requirement

You can find the code files for this chapter on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Extending-Microsoft-Dynamics-365-Finance-and-Supply-Chain-Management-Cookbook-Second-Edition/blob/master/Chapter%2011.axpp.

Creating a service

There are three parts to creating a new service:

• Creating a class that contains the business logic
• Creating a service that has operations that reference operations to the class's methods
• Creating a service group

The service group is a collection of one or more services and acts as the service reference, should we consume it within Visual Studio. We will see how this translates to a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) in the next recipe.

In this example, we will have two service operations: one to get a list of vehicles, and one to update a vehicle's group. The XML documentation has been omitted to save space.

Getting ready

We will just need a Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations Visual Studio...

Consuming a SOAP service in an external application

In this recipe, we will create a new C# project to consume the service we created in the previous recipe.

Before we start, we should understand the Azure AD authentication concepts we explained in the Reading, writing, and updating data through OData recipe in Chapter 10, Data Management, Odata, and Office. Many of the concepts in the following recipes extend the concepts we covered in this chapter. In this example, we will create a SOAP service reference.

Getting ready

This is a continuation of the Creating a service recipe, so it must be completed before we can continue.

How...

Consuming a JSON service in an external application

In this recipe, we will extend the previous C# project to consume the service using JSON.

The primary difference is that JSON will not create the contract and client classes for us; we will need to write them ourselves. We will use a NuGet package to help with the serialization and deserialization of C# classes to JSON.

Getting ready

This recipe is a continuation of the Consuming a SOAP service in an external application recipe, which must be completed before we can continue. This recipe builds on the existing ConServiceTest C# project that we created in the previous recipe.

How...

Consuming an external service within F&O

This technique hasn't changed substantially since Dynamics AX 2012. The key difference is that we will need to manually craft the binding. We still need to create a C# project to consume the web service, and then use it as a reference within our F&O project.

The example service is a weather service provided by Open Weather (https://openweathermap.org/). There is no recommendation here. It was simply the first one I found when I searched for weather web services. The aim is to create a recipe that you can use for your web services. The chosen service, in this case, isn't relevant.

When selecting a service to use, we must check the license terms and conditions since not all of them are free to use. Just because the license terms aren't enforced doesn't mean that the service is free to use.

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