creating a coldfusion webservice to return xml problem

Report · May 20, 2010

Hi I am creating a coldfsion webservice that is to be used by other platforms ( asp etc). In my webservice I have a method that I want to return data as XML which can then be read easily by these different platforms. At the moment I have something like this....

<cffunction name="getBlogs" hint="I search the live blogs" access="remote" returntype="xml">
        <cfargument name="limit" required="No" default="" type="any">
        <cfargument name="blogCategoryTypeName" required="No" default="Web analytics" type="any">
        <cfset var qrySearch = "">
        <cfset var strXML = "">
        <cfquery name="qrySearch" datasource="#variables.dsn#">
            select
                blogsLive.blogId
                , blogsLive.blogHeadline
                , blogsLive.blogSummary
            from
                blogs
            where
                blogslive.blogStatusId = 2
        </cfquery>

       <cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true" />
        <cfprocessingdirective suppresswhitespace="yes">
        <cfxml variable="objXML">
        <cfoutput>
          <blogs>
              <cfloop array="#results#" index="b">
              <blog id="#b['blogId']#">
                <headline>#XMLFormat(b['blogHeadline'])#</headline>
                <summary>#XMLFormat(b['blogSummary'])#</summary>
              </blog>
            </cfloop>
          </blogs>
        </cfoutput>
        </cfxml>
        <cfset strXML = #ToString(objXML)#>
        <cfset strXML = #replace(strXML,"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""UTF-8""?>","")#>
        </cfprocessingdirective>

        <cfreturn strXML>

    </cffunction>

The problem I am having is that when calling this webservice via classic ASP for example it sees the xml as a string and hence it quite difficult to manipulate. I would like to return the data like the following example:

http://api.getclicky.com/api/stats/4?site_id=32020&sitekey=2e05fe2778b6&type=visitors,countries,sear...

How can i get the webservice to return data like the link above? So for example if i call mty webservice like link above i get the same type of result?

Any help much appreciated

Report · May 20, 2010

I've had similar issues. I've been asked to write web services for asp.net apps and basically, if you include the opening xml tag, asp can't consume it. I handled my own problem by including an argument that determined whether to return the data with the xml tag or without.