For Developers

SOAP Requests & Authentication

The D&B Web Service Gateway (WSG) supports the SOAP message protocol for calling service actions over an HTTP connection. The easiest way to use the SOAP interface with your application is to use a SOAP toolkit appropriate for your programming platform. SOAP toolkits are available for most popular programming languages and platforms. The service's Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file describes the operations along with the format and data types of the operations' requests and responses. Your SOAP toolkit interprets the WSDL files to provide your application access to the operations. For most toolkits, your application calls a service action using routines and classes provided or generated by the toolkit.

Structure of a SOAP Request

A SOAP request is an XML data structure that your SOAP toolkit generates and sends to the service. As described by the service WSDLs, the root element of this structure is named after the operations. You include the parameters for the request inside the root element, according to the WSG schema contained in each WSDL. All SOAP operations include the authentication information in the LoginIdentifier, LoginPassword, SubscriberNumber and UserId parameters in the request XML.