How does an application interact with TeamForge SOAP services?

TeamForge exposes a subset of the APIs defined by the application server as web services, through the SOAP protocol.

SOAP APIs

A SOAP proxy server and a SOAP API layer, both running on Apache Axis, expose a set of web services representing each TeamForge application.

The SOAP server provides the following functions:

While each TeamForge service has its own SOAP interface, interaction with all the services is designed to be as consistent as possible. The calls for each service are similar, although the data format and specific call parameters may be different.

For example, the following calls are consistent across all services:

The call parameters, however, are different. For example:

User-centric services

All services and APIs are user‐centric, meaning that all integrated applications must establish an individual connection to the SOAP server for each user. This differs from programming directly with an application server where one connection can be established for any number of users.

Activities that can be performed using the SOAP interface are by definition user‐based, such as retrieving a list of a userʹs projects, tasks, or assigned tracker artifacts. These activities therefore require an individual connection for each user.

Requiring individual connections also ensures that role‐based access control is checked for each action performed by each user. To ensure that security is enforced, RBAC checks are performed on each SOAP API call and cannot be disabled at the client level.