Web Services are an essential part of modernizing many legacy systems. CA 2E developers are able to build their own Web Services inside the CA 2E model. Recently, I worked with a customer on exposing some important parts of their CA 2E application through Web Services. There are several lessons we learned while implementing Web Services.
One item continued to show up regularly. The issue is uninitialized numeric variables. It is very important when passing numeric values in Web Services that they contain a value, even if the value is 0. The first thing that must be done when building a Web Service is to make sure the returning numeric values are set to 0. If you are returning an array of one or more values, all numeric values must be initialized. So if you are returning 50 elements in the array, all 50 need to be initialized. The best way to do this is to create a loop that reads each of the 50 elements and moves a zero value or blank value into each of the fields. This first step in the process can save you a lot of headache in the future.
