BriefYourMarket Web Service API Documentation Overview

Introduction

The BriefYourMarket Web Service was introduced as an alternative mechanism for Clients to interact with the BriefYourMarket System. The service supports a range of the functionality that is available to users of the main BriefYourMarket user interface.

The Web Service is utlised by a number of BriefYourMarket's own tools as well as by our clients and partners as an integration mechanism.

Technology Base

The BYM Web Service is implemented using Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This is a standard platform for implementing Service Oriented Applications. As such, it should be interoperable with systems built using a number of different technologies.

The web service is implemented using a secure connection (SSL) and uses the same user database as our clients already use to log into the BYM management site.

Available Functionality

The BYM Web Service allows a client application to carry out the following operations:

The interface is designed with scalability and responsiveness in mind, so it is possible to build a client application that gives immediate feedback.

Obviously, the main reason for this service is to enable automated integration. In future versions we anticipate adding a broader subset of BYM functionality to the Service.

Detailed Technical Specification

The following discussion looks in slightly more detail at the Web Service.

Connecting to the Web Service

The Service is available at the url

https://service.briefyourmarket.com/BYMService.svc

If a developer is using Visual Studio 2008/2010, they should create a Service Reference to point to this url. This will generate a proxy class for accessing the Web Service.

Other development tools may have support for generating proxies based on the WSDL returned from the above endpoint. If not, It will be necessary to build up the SOAP Envelopes manually. Currently there is no specific documentation on this, but we are happy to work with any development team who is trying to integrate to BriefYourMarket.

Security

The Web Service is configured to use the WCF TransportWithMessageCredentials security mode. This means that the credentials are passed in the header of the message, and the whole message is encrypted in a Secure Socket Layer Session.

Navigating the details...

The starting point for any developer is the IBYMService interface. This is the definition of the entry point of the service. By looking at the methods on this interface you can understand its supported functionality.

Sample Code

BriefYourMarket has an integration tool that is deployed on a large number of client sites that is used to push data into BriefYourMarket instances. The source code for this tool is available as a sample application. To download it click here.