Freddys: Connecting to NAV Web Services from Silverlight 3

[Blog bot]

Please read this post to get a brief explanation of the scenario I will implement in Silverlight. Yes, yes – I know it isn’t a fancy graphical whatever as Silverlight should be, but to be honest – I would rather do something crappy on purpose than trying to do something fancy and everybody would find it crappy anyway:-)


Getting started with Silverlight
http://silverlight.net/getstarted – is your friend. Go to the web site and click this button:



Or click the image above directly.

Within a few seconds you will find yourself installing all the free tools you need to start developing Silverlight applications.

On the getstarted web site you will also find videos and walkthroughs on how to develop in Silverlight.


Silverlight is .net and c# so really guys… – how hard can it be?
That was what I thought!

So I just downloaded the Silverlight development platform and started coding and as soon as I tried to connect to NAV Web Services I ran into the showstopper:



Meaning that for a Silverlight application to be able to communicate with NAV Web Services – it needs to be deployed in the same location as NAV Web Services – http://localhost:7047 – that doesn’t really sound like a good idea.

On MSDN i found this article explaining about this in detail: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...32(VS.95).aspx

Silverlight needs permission by the Web Services host to access the Web Service – it kind of seems like overkill due to the fact that our web services are authenticated with Windows Authentication but I guess there are other services where this makes sense.

To make a long story short – if connecting to http://localhost:7047/DynamicsNAV/WS/SystemService – then Silverlight will first try to download http://localhost:7047/clientaccesspolicy.xml and check whether this is OK, but as you can imagine – NAV doesn’t do that:-(


clientaccesspolicy.xml
So if NAV doesn’t support that – how do we get around this obstacle? (of course you know that there is a way – else you wouldn’t be reading this and I wouldn’t be writing it)

The trick is just to create a small windows service that does nothing but host this file. We are lucky that the endpoint of NAV Web Services is http://localhost:7047/DynamicsNAV – and everything underneath that – so I should be able to create a WCF Service hosting just the xml file on http://localhost:7047

NAV Policy Server



Подробнее