What's New in the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit

 

Microsoft Corporation

October 2003

Applies to:
    Microsoft® Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit

Summary: Provides an overview of the changes that were made since the last version of the Web Services Toolkit, Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0. (4 printed pages)

Download the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit 2.01.

Contents

Introduction
Changes in the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit
Installing the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit
Conclusion

Introduction

There are only minor updates to the functionality of the Microsoft® Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit from the previous version, Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0. The articles that refer to the previous version of the toolkit should work for the new version with only a few changes. This article briefly describes the changes to the toolkit as well as what you can do to upgrade your existing solutions.

Changes in the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit

If you used earlier versions of the toolkit, you may notice changes in the following three areas:

  • Microsoft Office SOAP 3.0 is required.
  • Complex type handling is improved.
  • The tool appears in the same language as Microsoft Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA).

Microsoft Office SOAP 3.0 Is Required

The Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit uses Microsoft Office SOAP 3.0, which is installed with the Microsoft Office 2003 System. A benefit of using Office SOAP 3.0 is that you do not need to redistribute SOAP to end users who have installed Microsoft Office 2003.

If you used the first or second version of the Web Service References Tool to add Web services to your projects, those projects are based on SOAP 2.0 or 3.0. Unless you reinstall SOAP 2.0 or SOAP 3.0, you may need to migrate your proxy classes to work with Microsoft Office SOAP 3.0.

The basic migration process requires only a few steps.

To convert an existing proxy class

  1. On the Tools menu, click References.

  2. Clear the check box beside Microsoft Soap Type Library.

  3. Select Microsoft Office Soap Type Library v3.0.

  4. Click OK.

  5. If you are converting from SOAP 2.0:

    In the proxy class code, replace any reference to SoapClient with a reference to SoapClient30. In the default code supplied by the earlier version of the Web Service References Tool, this replacement must be done in two places.

  6. If you are converting from SOAP 3.0 and your solution uses complex types:

    In Class_Initialize, replace PROGID='MSSOAP... with PROGID='MSOSOAP...

Complex Type Handling Is Improved

Earlier versions of the toolkit had difficulty handling complex types that contained VBA keywords and those that used unsupported XSD (XML Schema definition) constructs. In the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit, these types are represented in an IXMLDomNodeList object, which you can parse and read without problems stemming from naming conventions or structure.

Tool Appears in Same Language as Visual Basic for Applications

The Web Service References Tool now appears in the same language that VBA is set to use, as long as the language of the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit is installed. To enable multiple languages, you must install each language version of the toolkit that you want to use. As VBA switches languages, so does the Web Service References Tool.

Installing the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit

You can download the toolkit from the Microsoft Download Center. Installation instructions are given on the download page.

Conclusion

Most of the changes to the Web Services Toolkit simply add functionality. There are very few things that you must do to upgrade existing solutions that use Web services, or to create new solutions using the existing documentation on MSDN.

For more information about using the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit, see the documentation that is supplied with the tool. You can open the documentation by starting the Web Service References Tool in the Visual Basic Editor and then clicking Help.

Other Resources

The following articles provide information on using the toolkit. Remember, however, that you must change any reference to a Microsoft Soap Type Library, SOAP Toolkit 2.0, or SOAP Toolkit 3.0 to Microsoft Office Soap Type Library v3.0. Also, some Web services used in previous examples are no longer available. You may find another Web service that can replace a legacy service by doing a search using the Web Service References Tool.